My ten favorite works on display at the Louvre

By: Jackie Wullschläger, art critic / The Financial Times
Translation: Telegrafi.com

The Louvre, a former royal palace and the largest and most visited museum in the world, displays some 35 works of art dating from 7000 BC to the mid-XNUMXth century. Everyone gets lost inside, and it doesn't matter; whatever path you take, whatever object you encounter, the overall impression of human imagination and invention across civilizations and eras is thrilling and inspiring.

But as Louvre president Laurence des Cars has acknowledged, a visit to the overcrowded museum can also be a “physical ordeal,” and some spaces are in urgent need of improvement. Last month, President Macron announced a six-year restoration project, which includes a special entrance to see the The Mona LisaMost first-time visitors visit the 10 most popular stops, such as Mona Lisa, Venus of Milos and Nike of SamothraceI have chosen to exclude these from my personal list, as well as the other 30 works recommended on the museum's official map, assuming that visitors will seek them out according to their preferences.

My choices reflect my personal tastes, but each of them is an undisputed masterpiece, demonstrating the quality of the Louvre in every field.

1. Bust of Akhenaten (1352–1335 BC)

More than three thousand years old, this fragment of stone, with its elongated face and beard, almond-shaped eyes and thick lips, is so evocative, so abstract, that it makes time shrink, bringing to mind Modigliani or Cubist sculpture. Akhenaten was the pharaoh who, despite opposition, introduced monotheism – the worship of the sole sun – and ordered a new style of art, stylized and emotional, to reflect this. For me, this androgynous, almost geometric figure, with his arms crossed on his chest and an ambiguous expression – arrogant, suspicious, filled with inner determination – is the most enigmatic character in the Louvre.

2. Lamassu (720–705 BC)

Under natural light streaming through a glass dome, Khorsabad houses the remains of a city built by the Assyrian king Sargon II, near present-day Mosul. It is an extraordinary evocation of a courtyard in Sargon’s immense palace, which was guarded by these magnificent hybrid beasts, each carved from a single 28-ton block of alabaster. Combining the protective powers of different animals, the Lamasutes have the bodies and ears of bulls, the wings of eagles, and human faces, with thick, menacing eyebrows but a slight smile. The expressive carving of fur, feathers, and hair, dramatically repeated, gives them life and monumentality – they are at once fascinating and majestic.

3. Old Centaur (100–200 AD)

White marble sculptures, mostly Roman copies of Greek originals, dating back to the 17th century, shine in the Hall of the Caryatids. Among the many intriguing creatures, the Old Centaur, with his human head tilted at an unexpected angle towards the teasing Cupid riding on his back, is always captivating: a metaphor for age and youth, the travails of love, untamed nature in the face of civilization.

4. Chancellor Rolin's Madonna (1435) by Jan van Eyck

Northern Renaissance painting is often overlooked at the Louvre; however, last year’s special exhibition devoted to this mysterious and captivating work gave it the attention it deserves. Its strange contrasts – the earthly chancellor, flowing and charismatic, boldly depicted at the same size as the Virgin; the miniaturized Burgundian city in the background that seems like an ideal world; the Italian loggia opening onto a small, enigmatic garden – make this work a wonderful combination of medieval enlightenment and the dawn of Flemish naturalism.

5. The Virgin and Child with Four Angels (1464-'69) by Agostino di Duccio

Duccio's masterfully sculpted relief reflects Donatello's influence – naturalism, dynamism and spatial illusion – but at the same time clearly expresses his own unique style: linear elegance, undulating textile arabesques and gently bowed heads, making the marble seem almost ethereal. The Donatello Gallery, one of the Louvre's least visited spaces, contains a wealth of sculptures Madonna and Child, created by contemporaries of the great Florentine pioneer, but none is more moving than this work by Duccio.

6. Dessert table (1640) by Jan Davidsz de Heem

A velvet curtain is pulled aside, and a large, tilted fruit platter, a bronze goblet decorated with a bird-shaped lid, and a goblet with elegantly curved forms stand like actors in de Heem’s lavish theater. The material precision is typical of the Dutch still life tradition; the deliberately disordered composition—a dessert cut in half, scattered grapes, a wrinkled cloth—gives this scene a baroque sense of luxury and opulence. Matisse, in his Cubist version of this painting (1915, MoMA), paid homage to de Heem’s architectural structure.

7. The four seasons (1660-'64) by Nicolas Poussin

Up in the Richelieu Wing, I usually find myself alone with Poussin’s works: cerebral, clear, and models of stoicism. Their emotional impact unfolds slowly and with particular solemnity in this perfect interpretation of the power, grandeur, and variety of nature. “Spring,” perfectly balancing light and shadow, is set in the morning. The blocks of wheat harvested at noon announce “Summer.” Evening casts shadows on the grape harvest in “Autumn,” with a hint of the savagery of Baku; then comes the shock of flood and death in the dark, moonlit “Winter”—still a classic painting, but one that opens the way to Romanticism.

8. Departure for Kitera (1717) by Jean-Antoine Watteau

Watteau invented the style gala dinner, setting the pastoral idyll at aristocratic outdoor parties. The effortless elegance – graceful, curvaceous figures, fluttering silk dresses, rhythmic choreography, airy backdrops – evokes the privilege of ancien régime, but surpasses it: a timeless celebration of pleasure and freedom, tinged with notes of fragility, melancholy, and transience. This was Monet's favorite painting in the Louvre.

9. Basket of strawberries (1761) by Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin

The Louvre's latest acquisition was made possible thanks to a donation from Bernard Arnault of LVMH and 10 individual contributors, proving Chardin to be a beloved emblem of French painting and cultural identity. The Pyramid of Strawberries, their bright red color reflected in the glass of water, the balance of colors between the cherries on the right and the silver accent of the scattered flowers, is an extraordinary example of the transparency of light, the harmony of colors and the poetry in simplicity.

10 Women of Algeria (1834) by Eugène Delacroix

No visitor escapes the great romantic paintings – Medusa's Boat by Géricault, The Death of Sardanapalus by Delacroix – in the Red Room. The (relatively) small treasure here is Delacroix's finest painting, recently cleaned, which shines in its chromatic complexity and clear brushstrokes. Every inch of it Women of Algeria It is a surface of sensuality and seduction – embroidered suits, sparkling earrings, bracelets, pearls, a pale rose in dark hair, golden slippers carelessly thrown on ornate carpets – yet these magnificently adorned women are untroubled, glorious in their indifference to us. Cézanne said that this painting “comes into the eye like a glass of wine … and intoxicates you immediately.” /Telegraph/