The Louvre

The stops start outside, go down to the oldest stones, then follow the usual route through the Denon wing and on to Sully and Richelieu. Nobody does all thirteen in one visit. Choose.

1. The pyramid: a new door for an old house

By 1980 the Louvre had a problem. It had many small doors and no proper entrance, and a government ministry occupied one whole wing. In 1981 President Mitterrand decided to give the entire palace to the museum. In 1983 he chose I. M. Pei, without a competition.

Pei put the entrance underground, in the middle of the courtyard, and lit it through a pyramid of glass 21.6 metres high. Paris was furious. Newspapers called it a scar on the face of the city. It opened in March 1989. Within a few years it was on every postcard.

Pei's family came from Suzhou and owned one of its classical gardens, the Lion Grove. He said later that in a Chinese garden you never see the whole at once; you are led from one view to the next. The hall under the pyramid works the same way.

2. The medieval Louvre: the fortress under the palace

Go down in the Sully wing. You walk in what was the moat of the fortress built in 1190 by King Philip Augustus, with the base of its round keep. It was found again when the ground was dug for Pei's project.

The painting of about 1416 shows what stood here then: a castle of pointed towers above peasants sowing a field. In 1528 King Francis I pulled the keep down, and from 1546 he had a palace in the new Italian style begun in its place.

Francis I is also the reason the Mona Lisa is in France. He invited the old Leonardo da Vinci to live near his château at Amboise. Leonardo came in 1516 with the painting in his baggage, and died there in 1519.

3. The Winged Victory: a goddess landing on a ship

At the top of the Daru staircase. She was found in 1863 on the Greek island of Samothrace, in more than a hundred pieces, and was carved about 190 BC. The grey block under her is the prow of a warship. She has just come down on it, and the wind still pulls at her dress.

The statue is 2.75 metres high, and with the ship 5.57. Her right hand, found in 1950, is in a glass case nearby. The head has never been found.

On 3 September 1939, the day France declared war, she was rolled down these stairs on a wooden ramp and taken to a château in the country. Almost everything movable in the Louvre left Paris that autumn.

4. The Mona Lisa, and the painting on the opposite wall

Room 711, the Salle des États. The sitter is Lisa Gherardini, wife of a Florentine silk merchant, Francesco del Giocondo; hence her other names, La Gioconda and La Joconde. Leonardo began it about 1503 and kept working on it for years. He never handed it over.

Look at the corners of the mouth and eyes. There are no lines. Leonardo laid thin glazes of paint one over another until the edges dissolved. Italians call it sfumato, "smoked". That is why the smile seems to change as your eye moves.

On 21 August 1911 a workman named Vincenzo Peruggia, who had helped make its glass case, lifted it off the wall and walked out with it under his smock. It lay in a trunk in his room in Paris for more than two years. He was caught in Florence in December 1913, trying to sell it.

Now turn round. The wall facing the Mona Lisa is filled by the largest painting in the Louvre: The Wedding at Cana by Veronese, 1563, nearly ten metres wide. Napoleon's army took it from a monastery in Venice in 1797 and cut it in two to carry it. Most people in this room never look at it.

5. The Grande Galerie and the big French pictures

The gallery beside the Salle des États runs for nearly 300 metres along the river. It was built about 1600 to join the Louvre to another palace, the Tuileries, which stood where the garden begins and was burned in 1871. The painter Hubert Robert, who helped set up the museum, painted it in the 1790s as he hoped it would look.

In the red rooms nearby hang three pictures every French schoolchild knows. Delacroix's Liberty Leading the People shows the Paris rising of July 1830. Géricault's Raft of the Medusa shows the survivors of a real shipwreck of 1816: 147 people were put on a raft and 15 were alive when it was found. David's Coronation shows Napoleon, in 1804, crowning his wife; he had already crowned himself.

6. The Venus de Milo

Sully wing, ground floor. A farmer on the Greek island of Milos dug her up in April 1820. A French naval officer saw her, and France bought her. She was carved about 150 to 125 BC, and stands just over two metres high.

She is made of two blocks joined at the hips, hidden by the drapery. The left arm was a separate piece, pegged on. Nobody knows what the arms were doing. Holding an apple, a shield, a mirror, and spinning thread have all been proposed.

The Louvre needed her. In 1815, after Napoleon fell, France had to give back a famous Venus taken from Florence. Five years later this one arrived, and the museum promoted her hard.

7. The Apollo Gallery and the crown jewels

This gilded room was rebuilt after a fire in 1661 for the young Louis XIV, the Sun King, with Apollo, god of the sun, on the ceiling. It was the trial piece for the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles. The centre of the ceiling stayed empty for two centuries, until Delacroix painted it in 1851.

The cases hold what is left of the French crown jewels. The Regent, a diamond of 140 carats found in India about 1698, was worn by Louis XV at his coronation and set in the hilt of Napoleon's sword.

On the morning of 19 October 2025 thieves reached a window of this gallery from a lift mounted on a lorry, cut their way in, and left within minutes with eight pieces of the crown jewels. A crown they dropped outside was recovered, damaged.

8. Richelieu wing: the oldest law you can read

The black stone pillar, 2.25 metres high, carries the laws of Hammurabi, king of Babylon, cut about 1754 BC. There are 282 of them. At the top the king stands before the sun god, who hands him the right to judge.

Law 196 says: if a man puts out the eye of another man, his eye shall be put out. That is the source of "an eye for an eye". Others set a builder's wages and the fine for a bad one whose house falls down.

In the next rooms stand the winged bulls with human heads from the palace of the Assyrian king Sargon II, built about 710 BC at Khorsabad in what is now Iraq. Count the legs. There are five, so that the beast stands still seen from the front and walks seen from the side.

9. Egypt: a scribe who looks back at you

Sully wing, first floor. The Seated Scribe was made about 2500 BC and found at Saqqara in 1850. He holds a roll of papyrus and waits to write. His eyes are rock crystal set in copper, and they seem to follow you.

Downstairs, the Great Sphinx of Tanis guards the entrance to the Egyptian rooms. It is cut from one block of granite nearly five metres long. Several pharaohs carved their names on it, each over the last.

10. Two glass courts and an emperor's drawing rooms

Until 1989 the Richelieu wing was the Ministry of Finance, and its courtyards were car parks. Pei roofed them in glass. Now they hold French garden sculpture, among it the rearing Marly Horses of the 1740s.

Upstairs are the apartments of Napoleon III, finished in 1861: red velvet, gilding, chandeliers. The emperor did not live in them. They were the reception rooms of his minister of state, and later of the finance minister, who gave them up only when the museum took over the wing.

11. How a palace became a museum

In 1682 Louis XIV moved his court to Versailles. The Louvre was left to artists, who lived and worked in it, and to the royal academies.

On 10 August 1793, a year to the day after the monarchy fell, the revolutionary government opened the Grande Galerie to the public with 537 paintings, most of them taken from the king and the Church. Entry was free.

Napoleon filled it with art seized across Europe and renamed it after himself. After Waterloo in 1815 more than five thousand works went home. Some, like the Wedding at Cana, stayed.

12. The Louvre and China

The year the museum opened, 1793, a British embassy under Lord Macartney reached the court of the Qianlong Emperor and was sent away with nothing. In Paris a palace was being opened to the people; in Beijing the palace was closed to the world.

When Philip Augustus built his fortress here in 1190, China was divided between the Southern Song (1127–1279) and the Jin. Hangzhou, the Song capital, was then one of the largest cities on earth. Paris had perhaps fifty thousand people.

I. M. Pei left Shanghai for the United States in 1935 and did not see China again for almost forty years. In 2006, aged 89, he finished a museum for Suzhou, next to the gardens of his childhood.

13. On the screen

The Da Vinci Code (2006) opens with a murder in the Grande Galerie. The crew filmed inside the museum at night; the Mona Lisa seen in the film is a copy.

In Jean-Luc Godard's Bande à part (1964) three friends run through the whole museum to beat a record of nine minutes and forty-five seconds. They were filmed doing it for real, with guards chasing them.

In 2018 Beyoncé and Jay-Z filmed the video for "Apeshit" in front of the Mona Lisa, the Winged Victory and the Coronation. That year the museum had 10.2 million visitors, more than any museum had ever had.

The French series Lupin (2021) begins with the theft of a queen's necklace from the Louvre. It was filmed in the museum. Four years later real thieves took real crown jewels from the Apollo Gallery.