4.9/5
Stand in Room 711 on a busy afternoon and watch the crowd instead of the art. Hundreds of phones point at a poplar panel about 31 inches tall, sealed in a glass case in the middle of the floor. Behind those phones, on the opposite wall, hangs a canvas roughly 22 feet high and 33 feet wide, crammed with a wedding party of some 130 figures. Almost nobody turns around.
That scene sums up the problem with the famous paintings in the Louvre museum: one picture eats all the attention, and the rest wait politely a few steps away. Here are 15 that deserve a visit of their own, grouped by where they hang so you can walk them in order without doubling back. Plenty of these faces will look familiar, because several belong to the paintings people most want to hang at home.
Room 711: the painting behind you
1. The Wedding Feast at Cana, Paolo Veronese (1562–1563)
Veronese painted his enormous Venetian banquet for the refectory of the Benedictine monks at San Giorgio Maggiore in Venice, the room where they ate every day. He took the Gospel story of water turned into wine and moved it into a lavish wedding of his own city, packed with guests and servants under an open sky.
Napoleon's army removed it in 1797 and shipped it to Paris the next year. After the Empire fell in 1815, most of the confiscated Italian pictures went home. This one stayed: the return journey looked likely to wreck it, so France kept it and sent Venice a different painting instead. At 6.77 by 9.94 meters, it's the largest canvas in the whole collection.
The Mona Lisa has shared this room with it since 1966, and she's been behind protective glass since 2005. The walls went midnight blue in 2019, and the room's own history is worth a minute: built 1855–1857, it once hosted legislative sessions under Napoleon III. My advice: skip the queue for the glass case, stand at the back wall and give the Veronese five full minutes. You'll find faces in the crowd that no postcard shows.
Rooms 700 and 702: French painting at full volume
A short walk from the Mona Lisa, the big French canvases begin. Room 702, the Salle Daru, holds the Neoclassical pictures. Room 700, the Salle Mollien, holds the Romantics. Walk from one into the other and you've crossed an argument about what painting was for.
2. The Coronation of Napoleon, Jacques-Louis David (1805–1807)
Napoleon ordered this picture in September 1804, before the ceremony even happened, and David's record of that December day came out at 6.21 by 9.79 meters, with about 190 figures, 93 of them identifiable portraits. The moment David chose is the clever part. Napoleon has already crowned himself and now lifts a second crown toward Josephine, who kneels before him. Pope Pius VII sits behind, a witness rather than the man in charge.
David asked 100,000 francs and settled for 65,000, paid in three installments. The canvas hung at Versailles from 1837 and reached the Louvre in 1890.
3. The Oath of the Horatii, Jacques-Louis David
Same room, earlier David, and a much tighter picture. Louis XVI commissioned it through the comte d'Angiviller around 1781–1782, and David painted it in Rome, finishing in July 1785 in time for that year's Salon. Three brothers raise their arms toward the swords their father holds up; on the right, the women of the family fold in grief. At 3.3 by 4.25 meters it's half the width of the Coronation, and it hits twice as hard.
4. La Grande Odalisque, Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres (1814)
Ingres painted his reclining nude in 1814 for Caroline Murat, Queen of Naples. She wears a turban, holds a peacock-feather fan and looks back over her shoulder from a heap of blue cushions. The picture went to the Salon of 1819, and the French state bought it in 1899. Look at the length of her back. It's longer than any real spine, and that stretch is the whole point: Ingres cared more about the line than the anatomy.
5. The Raft of the Medusa, Théodore Géricault (1818–1819)
On July 2, 1816, the French frigate Méduse ran aground on the Arguin Bank off Senegal. The crew lashed together a raft from the wreckage and put about 150 people on it. The boats towing it cut the lines. After twelve days adrift, only fifteen were still alive when the brig Argus spotted them.
Géricault turned that scandal into his 23-foot shipwreck canvas, shown at the Salon of 1819. The bodies build into a pyramid that climbs from the dead at the bottom to a man waving a cloth at the top. Géricault died young, and the Louvre bought the painting at the sale of his estate in November 1824 for 6,005 francs. Its catalogue entry lays out the wreck day by day, if you want the full story before you go.
6. Liberty Leading the People, Eugène Delacroix (1830)
This isn't the French Revolution of 1789. It's the three days of street fighting in July 1830 that brought down Charles X. Delacroix painted his bare-breasted Liberty on the barricade between September and December of that year. It went to the Salon of 1831, and the state bought it that August for 3,000 francs.
If you saw it before 2023, see it again. Conservators spent six months on it, from October 2023 to April 2024, and took off eight layers of yellowed varnish. Liberty's dress turned out to be light gray with hints of gold, not yellow, and the boy with the pistols stands in front of her, not beside her. "We're the first generation to rediscover the color," said Sébastien Allard, the Louvre's director of paintings, when it went back on the wall. Smithsonian magazine has a good account of the cleaning that changed her dress.
Which Leonardo paintings hang in the Louvre besides the Mona Lisa?
Three more, all in the Grande Galerie next door (Room 710), and you can usually stand right in front of them. The gallery was begun under Henri IV in 1595 and measured 460 meters when finished. It opened to the public on August 10, 1793, and the long Italian gallery also holds Raphael and Mantegna. If you've ever wanted to compare the Leonardo panels copied most often, this is where to do it in person.
7. The Virgin of the Rocks (about 1483–1494)
On April 25, 1483, Leonardo and the brothers Ambrogio and Evangelista de Predis signed a contract for an altarpiece in the chapel of the Immaculate Conception at San Francesco Grande in Milan. Two versions exist. The earlier grotto scene is this one; the other is in London. Look at the angel on the right: scientific study shows Leonardo changed its gesture and gaze while painting, and it first matched the London composition. The picture was first recorded at Fontainebleau in 1625 and was moved from wood onto canvas in 1806.
8. The Virgin and Child with Saint Anne (1503–1519)
Leonardo started this panel in Florence around 1503 and never let it go. He was still working on it when he died in 1519, and Francis I probably bought it in 1518. Mary sits on her mother's lap and reaches for the Christ Child, who grabs a lamb. The 2010–2012 restoration found what may be the last brushstrokes on Anne's robe, and Mary's face never got its final soft transitions. You're looking at a painting Leonardo simply didn't finish.
9. Saint John the Baptist (1508–1519)
A smiling figure emerges from total darkness, one finger pointing up. It's small, just 0.729 by 0.563 meters on walnut, and it's the strangest Leonardo in Paris. The panel took a long trip: Francis I, then a French duke, then Charles I of England around 1630, then the banker Everhard Jabach, and finally Louis XIV, who bought it in 1662.
A rejected altarpiece in Room 712
10. The Death of the Virgin, Caravaggio (1601–1606)
Laerzio Cherubini ordered it in 1601 for Santa Maria della Scala in Trastevere, Rome. Caravaggio delivered at the end of 1605 or early 1606, and the clergy refused it. Mary lies on a bier in a plain red dress with one arm hanging loose, and the apostles around her grieve like tired, ordinary men. There are no angels. The Duke of Mantua bought it in 1607, Charles I of England in 1627, and Jabach sold it to Louis XIV in 1671. The canvas stands 3.69 meters tall, so step back.
Richelieu, second floor: small pictures, long looks
Most visitors never climb up here. That's the reason to go.
11. The Madonna of Chancellor Rolin, Jan van Eyck (about 1430–1435)
Nicolas Rolin, chancellor to Philip the Good, Duke of Burgundy, kneels in prayer facing the Virgin, while an angel holds a crown over her head. Behind them, three arches open onto a garden, a city, open country and mountains, all painted at a scale you need to lean in to read. Van Eyck's oak panel for Rolin measures only 0.66 by 0.62 meters. It hung in the church of Notre-Dame-du-Châtel in Autun, was seized in the Revolution and arrived at the Louvre in 1800. Find it in Room 818.
12. The Lacemaker, Johannes Vermeer (1669–1670)
It's 24 by 21 centimeters, about the size of a hardcover book, and people walk past it all day. A young woman bends over her bobbins. Red and white threads spill out of a sewing cushion at the left, painted loose and liquid while her fingers stay sharp. The light comes from the right, which is rare in Vermeer. The Louvre bought it in 1870 from Eugène Féral. It hangs in Room 837, and if it hooks you, the rest of Vermeer's quiet interiors are worth a look.
13. Bathsheba at Her Bath, Rembrandt (1654)
Bathsheba sits naked, holding the letter from King David, and she isn't happy about it. Rembrandt painted her on a canvas now 1.42 meters square, cut down at the top and left at some point in its history. Hendrickje Stoffels is often thought to have posed. Dr. Louis La Caze left it to the Louvre in 1869. It's in Room 844, and it's one of the best arguments for Rembrandt's late, heavy brushwork.
Sully, second floor: the French rooms people skip
14. Pilgrimage to Cythera, Antoine Watteau (1717)
Watteau submitted this as his reception piece to the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture in 1717, and the Academy kept it in its meeting hall at the Louvre for the rest of the century. Couples in silk drift down a slope toward a golden boat on the island of love. Are they arriving or leaving? Art historians have argued about it for a long time, and the melancholy mood suggests leaving. It measures 1.29 by 1.94 meters, in Room 917.
15. The Cheat with the Ace of Diamonds, Georges de La Tour (1636–1640)
A rich young man plays cards with a courtesan, a servant pouring wine and a cheat who pulls an ace of diamonds from behind his back. Their eyes do all the talking. The Louvre bought it in 1972. American readers get a bonus: an earlier version, the Cheat with the Ace of Clubs, hangs at the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth, and La Tour worked from it when he made the later Paris version. One change to spot: the servant's bodice, red in Texas, is dark blue-green in Room 912.
How to see all 15 in one visit
Start on Level 1 of the Denon wing. Room 711 gives you the Veronese. Step into the Grande Galerie (710 and 712) for the three Leonardos and the Caravaggio, then cross to Room 702 for David and Ingres and Room 700 for Géricault and Delacroix. After that, go up to Level 2: Richelieu for van Eyck, Vermeer and Rembrandt (818, 837, 844), then Sully for Watteau and La Tour (917, 912). Follow the room numbers rather than the signs to the Mona Lisa, and you'll move faster.
If you only have an hour, stay on Level 1. Ten of the 15 are there, all within a few minutes of each other.
A few of them on your wall
Several of these pictures, from the Veronese feast to the Géricault raft, are available at Art & See as hand-painted oil reproductions, made to the size you choose. A 33-foot banquet won't fit most dining rooms, but a scaled copy will. Browse every masterpiece the studio paints by hand and pick the one you walked back to twice.
Sources
- Louvre Collections, The Wedding Feast at Cana
- Louvre Collections, The Coronation of Napoleon
- Louvre Collections, The Raft of the Medusa
- Louvre Collections, Liberty Leading the People
- Louvre Collections, The Virgin of the Rocks
- Louvre, The Salle des États
- Louvre, The Grande Galerie
- Smithsonian Magazine, Liberty restoration
