Mona Lisa
Leonardo da Vinci · 1503
Louvre
Paris
A king's palace that became the largest museum in the world, holding the Mona Lisa, the Venus de Milo and the Winged Victory under one roof.
- 500,000+
- Works catalogued
- 9M
- Visitors in 2025
- 30,000
- Works of art on display
Play 44 works from this collection on your TV, phone or tablet with Momentable Art TV.
Play CollectionA palace before it was a museum
The Louvre was the residence of French monarchs before it was a museum, and the palace grew around their ambitions wing by wing. The museum opened in 1793, in the years after the Revolution. Today the Louvre describes itself as the largest museum in the world, and the label is not idle: a full visit is a project of days, not hours. The museum’s collections database holds entries for more than 500,000 works across the Louvre and the Musée national Eugène-Delacroix.
Three rooms people cross the world for
The Mona Lisa hangs in the Salle des États, the largest room in the Louvre, alongside Veronese's enormous Wedding Feast at Cana. The painting is a portrait of Lisa Gherardini, wife of the Florentine merchant Francesco del Giocondo, painted in oil on a poplar panel and begun by 1503 at the latest. Leonardo kept it with him until his death.
The Venus de Milo stands in the Sully wing, armless and unhurried. She was found on the island of Melos in 1820, bought almost at once by the Marquis de Rivière, and given by Louis XVIII to the Louvre in March 1821. She is carved from Parian marble and stands just over two metres tall; the Louvre dates her to between 150 and 125 BC.
The Winged Victory of Samothrace waits at the top of the Daru staircase, headless, turning into the wind. She was made as an offering to the gods for a sanctuary on the Greek island of Samothrace, and shows Nike, the goddess of victory, landing on a ship's prow. The Louvre dates her to the first quarter of the second century BC; no artist is named.
What to see
Mona Lisa
Leonardo da Vinci · 1503
A half-length portrait of Lisa Gherardini, seated on a terrace with a hazy river valley behind her. The hands rest one over the other; the mouth is the part everyone leans in for.
The Wedding Feast at Cana
Veronese's monumental banquet fills the wall opposite the Mona Lisa in the Salle des États: more than six metres high and almost ten metres wide, with some 130 figures in a blaze of Venetian colour.
Venus de Milo
Marble, carved from two blocks joined at the hips, with the left arm set in separately. The drapery slips toward her hips as she steps forward.
Liberty Leading the People
Eugène Delacroix · 1830
Delacroix painted the revolution of 27, 28 and 29 July 1830, which he witnessed in Paris. Liberty marches over the fallen in a Phrygian cap, rifle in one hand and the tricolour in the other, the smoke of the barricades behind her.
Winged Victory of Samothrace
Pythokritos
Wind presses the thin drapery against her body; the wings are spread for landing on the prow beneath her feet.
The Raft of the Medusa
Théodore Géricault · 1819
Géricault painted the wreck of the frigate Méduse, which ran aground off the coast of Africa on 2 July 1816. One hundred and fifty people were set adrift on a raft; twelve days later fifteen survivors were found by the brig Argus. The canvas is more than seven metres wide, and every figure in it is the size of life.
The Oath of the Horatii
Jacques-Louis David · 1784
Three brothers salute the swords their father holds up, while the women of the family weep at the right. Painted by Jacques-Louis David, the leading painter of French Neo-classicism, in Rome in 1784, the year signed on the canvas, and the year the Louvre dates it to.
The Coronation of Napoleon
Jacques-Louis David · 1807
Jacques-Louis David, 1805-07: Napoleon crowns his wife Joséphine in Notre-Dame, on a canvas 9.79 metres wide, in the Louvre.
Sleeping Hermaphroditus
An ancient Roman marble, its marble mattress carved by Bernini in 1620; sold to France at the end of the 18th century, and on display at the Louvre.
The Turkish Bath
Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres · 1862
Ingres painted it 1852-59 and modified it in 1862; the Louvre refused it twice before accepting it in 1911, a circle of women in steam.
Collections
Egyptian antiquities
Temples, coffins, scribes and sphinxes, from the Nile valley across four millennia. The Dendera zodiac, shown further down the page, belongs here.
Near Eastern antiquities
Winged guardians, palace reliefs and law carved in stone, including the Mesha Stele shown here, a royal inscription in Moabite stone.
Greek, Etruscan, and Roman
The Venus de Milo and the Winged Victory of Samothrace are the two names people come for, and the galleries around them hold the rest of the ancient Mediterranean.
Islamic art
Ceramics, metalwork, carpets and manuscripts across thirteen centuries.
Sculptures
European sculpture from the Middle Ages onward, including Canova's Psyche Revived by Cupid's Kiss, held in the Louvre's sculpture department.
Decorative arts
The French crown diamonds, including the Regent, and the objects of the royal apartments.
Painting
From the Italian Renaissance to 1848, in rooms that include the Mona Lisa, the Salle des États and the Grande Galerie.
Prints and drawings
Works on paper, shown in small rotations because light is hard on them.
Byzantine and Eastern Christian Art
Ivories, icons and silver of the Byzantine world and the eastern churches. The Barberini Ivory, shown here, is the only near-complete leaf of an imperial diptych that survives.
Artists
The Virgin of the Rocks · 1483–1486
Painter, sculptor, architect, designer, theorist, engineer and scientist: Leonardo created some of the most famous images in European art, and trained in Florence with the sculptor Andrea Verrocchio.
Portrait of Madame Récamier · 1800
Born in Paris and trained by the classicising artist Marie-Joseph Vien; from the outbreak of the Revolution to the fall of Napoleon, David and the members of his studio exercised a major influence over the arts in France.
Grande Odalisque · 1814
A pupil of Jacques-Louis David who came to prominence through portraiture, much of it under the influence of Italian art and of Raphael.
Portrait of Baldassare Castiglione · 1514–1515
Raffaello Santi was born in Urbino, where his father was court painter, and worked through central Italy, particularly Florence, before Rome.
The Fortune Teller · c. 1595
Born Michelangelo Merisi, and named for his home town in Lombardy; he moved to Rome in 1592 at twenty-one and changed painting there within a decade.
Orphan Girl at the Cemetery · 1824
The leading exponent of Romanticism in French painting, trained by Pierre Guérin; he painted Liberty Leading the People after the July Days of 1830.
Rembrandt
Bathsheba at Her Bath · 1654
Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn was born in Leiden in the Netherlands in 1606, the son of a miller comfortably off enough to send him to the town's Latin School.
The Lacemaker · c. 1669
One of the great Dutch masters, though only about 35 paintings by him are known. Born in Delft in 1632, he may have been a pupil of the local history painter Leonaert Bramer.
Woman with a Mirror · c. 1515
The greatest painter of 16th-century Venice, and the first painter to have a mainly international clientele.
Rogier van der Weyden
The Braque Triptych · c. 1452
One of the most profound and influential painters of the 15th century, internationally famed for the naturalism of his detail and his expressive pathos.
Albrecht Dürer
Portrait of the Artist Holding a Thistle · 1493
The archetypal Renaissance artist of Northern Europe: unique skills of observation, a master narrator and a superb technician.
Frans Hals
The Gypsy Girl · c. 1628
Born in Antwerp but worked for most of his life in Haarlem, where he is best known for portraits of its citizens, painted with an unparalleled sense of animation.
Artworks
The Embarkation for Cythera
Jean-Antoine Watteau · 1717
Watteau's pilgrims drift toward the boats of the island of love, silk against trees, a fête galante that launched the genre.
Crown of Napoleon
Martin Guillaume Biennais · 1804
The closed crown called the crown of Charlemagne, mounted for Napoleon's coronation and displayed at Notre-Dame from 1804 to 1816.
Psyche Revived by Cupid's Kiss
Antonio Canova · 1787–1793
Ship of Fools
Hieronymus Bosch · 1500
Bosch's passengers drink and bicker in a drifting boat with a tree for a mast, a strainer for a sail.
Magdalene with the Nightlight
Georges de La Tour · 1642
A woman sits by a lamp flame at night, hand on her knee, her face lit from below.
Marie de' Medici cycle
Peter Paul Rubens · 1622
The Moneylender and his Wife
Quinten Metsys · 1514
Quentin Metsys's couple sits at their counting table, the man weighing coins, his wife turning a page, a mirror in the background holding the whole street. The Louvre catalogue lists it as Le prêteur et sa femme.
An Old Man and his Grandson
Domenico Ghirlandaio · 1490
The Clubfoot
Jusepe de Ribera · 1642
Bonaparte Crossing the Alps
Paul Delaroche · 1848
Bonaparte Visiting the Plague Victims of Jaffa
Antoine-Jean Gros · 1804
Diana leaving her Bath
François Boucher · 1742
Sources
- Louvre, “The palace”
- Louvre, “A Revolutionary Museum”
- Louvre, “The Salle des États”
- Louvre collections, notice INV 779 (Mona Lisa)
- Louvre, “Ideal Greek Beauty”
- Louvre collections, notice LL 299 (Venus de Milo)
- Louvre, “A stairway to Victory”
- Louvre collections, notice Ma 2369 (Winged Victory)
- Louvre, “La restauration de la Liberté”
- Louvre collections, notice INV 4884 (Raft of the Medusa)
- National Gallery, London, “Jacques-Louis David”
- Louvre collections, notice MR 1777 (Psyche Revived)
- National Gallery, London, “Leonardo da Vinci”
- National Gallery, London, “Raphael”
- National Gallery, London, “Eugène Delacroix”
- National Gallery, London, “Ingres”
- National Gallery, London, “Caravaggio”
- Louvre collections, notice for the crown of Charlemagne
- Louvre collections, notice INV 1444 (The Moneylender and his Wife)
- Louvre collections, notice INV 3692 (The Oath of the Horatii)
- Louvre collections database
- Louvre press, “The Musée du Louvre at a glance”
- Louvre, “Services Publics+” (2025 visitor data)
- Louvre collections, notice INV 3708 (Portrait of Madame Récamier)
- Louvre collections, notice RF 1158 (La Grande Odalisque)
- Louvre collections, notice RF 1652 (Jeune orpheline au cimetière)
- Louvre collections, notice MI 1448 (La Dentellière)
- Louvre collections, notice INV 755 (La Femme au miroir)
- Louvre collections, notice RF 2063 (Triptyque de la famille Braque)
- Louvre collections, notice INV 55 (La diseuse de bonne aventure)
- Louvre collections, notice OA 9063 (Diptyque Barberini)
- Louvre collections, notice AO 5066 (Stèle de Mesha)
- Louvre collections, notice OA 11384 (Lit de repos, salon de Madame Récamier)
- Wikipedia, “Virgin of the Rocks”
- Wikipedia, “Portrait of Baldassare Castiglione”
- Wikipedia, “Bathsheba at Her Bath (Rembrandt)”
- Wikipedia, “Portrait of the Artist Holding a Thistle”
- Wikipedia, “The Gypsy Girl (Hals)”
- National Gallery, London, “Rembrandt”
- National Gallery, London, “Johannes Vermeer”
- National Gallery, London, “Titian”
- National Gallery, London, “Rogier van der Weyden”
- National Gallery, London, “Albrecht Dürer”
- National Gallery, London, “Frans Hals”
- Wikipedia, “Rebellious Slave”
- Wikipedia, “Gabrielle d'Estrées et une de ses sœurs”
- Wikipedia, "The Astronomer (Vermeer)"
- Wikipedia, "The Bolt (Fragonard)"
- Wikipedia, "Portrait of Louis XIV"
- Wikipedia, "Pietà of Villeneuve-lès-Avignon"
- Wikipedia, "The Card Sharp with the Ace of Diamonds"
- Wikipedia, "The Coronation of Napoleon"
- Wikipedia, "Sleeping Hermaphroditus"
- Wikipedia, "The Turkish Bath"
- Images via Wikimedia Commons
Invite the Louvre into your living room
Play 44 works from this collection on your TV, phone or tablet with Momentable Art TV.
