Louvre Museum Priority Access Guided Tour with Museum Icons Paris

The Louvre Museum and the glass pyramid

The Louvre began as a fortress in the 1190s, became a royal palace and opened as a public museum in 1793, during the Revolution. Today it is the largest art museum in the world, with around 35,000 works on display across eight departments in three wings that wrap round the main courtyard, where the glass pyramid of 1989 serves as the main entrance. Walking its galleries end to end would take days, which is why a Louvre guided tour that knows the shortest routes between the icons is the smartest way to spend a first visit.

Your guide leads the group in through a reserved-access entrance after the security check, which cannot be skipped, then down into the underground hall beneath the pyramid and up into the Denon wing. Louvre Museum opening hours run from nine in the morning, and the museum is closed on Tuesdays; the tour's late-morning and early-afternoon starts fit the quieter middle of the day.

The Winged Victory on the Daru staircase

The first icon of the route stands at the top of the grand Daru staircase in the Denon wing: the Winged Victory of Samothrace, a marble goddess of victory alighting on the prow of a warship, carved in the second century BC and discovered in fragments on the Greek island of Samothrace in 1863. Even without her head and arms she seems to lean into the wind, her drapery pressed against her body, and the museum placed her where every visitor climbing from the pyramid sees her first.

Your guide explains how the statue was reassembled, why the ship's prow was part of the original monument and what the sculpture tells us about Greek art after the age of the great temples. Allow ten minutes here; it is also one of the best photo spots in the museum, and the staircase is where you learn to read the Louvre's floor plan before entering the painting galleries.

The Mona Lisa and the Italian galleries

From the staircase the route passes through the Grande Galerie, the long corridor of Italian paintings that once connected the palace to the Tuileries, before reaching the Salle des États and the Mona Lisa. The portrait, painted in Florence at the start of the sixteenth century, hangs behind glass on its own wall, and your guide tells the story of its theft in 1911, its recovery two years later and the smile that has kept people guessing for five hundred years.

Opposite it hangs the largest painting in the Louvre, the Wedding Feast at Cana, which most visitors walk past while staring at the small portrait on the other wall. Is the Mona Lisa worth seeing? With a guide who manages the queue, explains what to look for and then turns you round to the masterpieces nobody else is looking at, yes. Plan about twenty-five minutes for this part of the tour.

French paintings of the Revolution era

Next door, in the red rooms of the Denon wing, hang the enormous canvases of French painting from the turn of the nineteenth century. Liberty Leading the People, painted after the uprising of July 1830, shows a bare-breasted figure of Liberty striding over a barricade with the tricolour flag, and your guide explains how it became an image of the French Republic itself. Beside it the Raft of the Medusa recreates a shipwreck survivors' ordeal with a pyramid of bodies that shocked the public in 1819.

The same rooms hold the vast coronation scene of the imperial court, ten metres wide, painted to record a ceremony at Notre-Dame. These paintings are where the Louvre tour becomes a history lesson about revolution, empire and restoration told through faces, flags and gestures. The guide spends around twenty minutes here, long enough to stand close and see the brushwork.

The Venus de Milo and the Greek antiquities

The last icon takes you into the Sully wing, the oldest part of the palace, where the Venus de Milo stands at the end of a gallery of Greek marble. Found by a farmer on the island of Milos in 1820 and carved around 100 BC, the goddess of love has lost both arms, and generations of scholars have argued about what she once held. Your guide points out the spiral twist of her body and the slipping drapery that made her the most admired statue of the nineteenth century.

On the way the group passes the Caryatids room, a sixteenth-century ballroom whose gallery is held up by four stone women, and the remains of the medieval moat. The tour ends after about two hours; you may stay inside the museum afterwards as long as you like, since the ticket covers the day. The surrounding Tuileries Garden is the natural place to rest afterwards.