A Walking Tour Paris

first opened to the public in 1793. Apart from the Mona Lisa, the enigmatic portrait of a Florentine noblewoman by Leonardo da Vinci, some of the collection’s highlights include the Venus de Milo, a 2nd-century BCE statue found on Milos in Greece in 1820 and the Marly Horses, from the Place de la Concorde. Sculpted by Guillaume Coustou, these are the originals, replicas having replaced them at their original locations.

The museum also features European painting from 1200 to 1850, European sculpture from 1100 to 1850, Oriental, Egyptian, Greek, Etruscan and Roman antiquities as well as jewellery and objets d’art. The painting collections are impressive, with other works by Leonardo da Vinci as well as his compatriots Raphael, Giotto, Fra Angelico, Piero della Francesca and Uccello. The French are represented by Watteau, Fragonard, Poussin and David, while England has Gainsborough, Reynolds and Turner (France’s only painting by Turner in fact). Germany’s Dürer, Cranach and Holbein are here as are Spain’s El Greco and Goya. The Netherlands is impressively well represented, with van Eyck, Bosch, van Dyck and Hals, not to mention Vermeer’s Lacemaker and three Rembrandts.

Some of the highlights of the sculpture collection is Milo of Crotona, the statue of the Greek athlete who caught his hands in the cleft of a tree and was eaten by a lion, as well as the wild horses of Marly, which stand in the glass-roofed Cour Marly. There are also works by Duccio and Donatello as well as Michelangelo’s Slaves and Cellini’s Fontainebleau Nymph.

Opening times: 9am–6pm Wed–Mon (to 10pm Wed and Fri).
Closed 1 Jan, 1 May, 11 Nov, 25 Dec
Automatic ticket booths are located in the Carrousel du Louvre
(No. 99 rue de Rivoli)
Website: www.louvre.fr
Tel: 01. 40 20 50 50

I. M. Pei was the only non-French architect to be awarded one of the Grands Projets. He’s a Chinese-born American and this may explain why his is the only building never to have won an award.