Louvre Museum Skip-the-Line Highlights Tour with Art Historian Paris

The Louvre: fortress, palace and museum

The Louvre began around 1190 as a fortress guarding the western edge of Paris; its round keep was pulled down in the sixteenth century, but the base of the medieval walls can still be seen in the basement. The kings of France rebuilt it as a Renaissance palace, extended it for two centuries along the Seine and then left it for Versailles. It opened as a public museum in 1793, during the Revolution, and today it is the largest museum in the world, with about 35,000 works on display across 73,000 square metres and three wings, Denon, Sully and Richelieu, around the glass pyramid added in 1989.

A Louvre skip-the-line tour matters because the pyramid queue can take well over an hour, and because the building is so large that visitors without a plan spend their time lost. Louvre opening hours are 9:00 to 18:00, with late openings on Wednesday and Friday evenings; the museum is closed on Tuesdays, so this tour runs the other six days at 11:15.

The Winged Victory of Samothrace and the Daru staircase

The first great stop is at the top of the Daru staircase, where the Winged Victory stands alone on a marble prow: a Greek statue of the goddess of victory carved around 190 BC, found in pieces on the island of Samothrace in 1863 and reassembled here. Her head and arms are lost, but the wind pressing her tunic against her body and the wings spread behind her make her one of the most admired sculptures in the world, described as the greatest masterpiece of Hellenistic art. The staircase was designed so that visitors would discover her from below.

The guide explains how the statue was found, how it was cleaned and restored in 2014 and why the position on the stairs was chosen. Expect to spend about ten minutes here; it is also the best place in the Louvre tour to understand the layout of the Denon wing, which holds most of the highlights you will see.

The Venus de Milo and the Greek rooms

In the Sully wing, the galleries of classical Greek sculpture lead to the Venus de Milo, the marble goddess of love carved around 130 to 100 BC and found by a farmer on the island of Milos in 1820. Her arms were already missing when she arrived in Paris the following year, and the mystery of how they were posed has been argued over ever since. The guide points out the spiral twist of the body, the join between the two blocks of marble and the way the drapery seems about to slip, details that explain why this statue became the symbol of ancient beauty.

The rooms around her hold the Louvre's collection of Greek vases, bronzes and the frieze fragments of the Parthenon, and the guide chooses a few to show how Greek sculpture moved from stiff archaic figures to the living bodies of the classical age. This part of the Louvre highlights tour takes about twenty minutes.

The Italian galleries and the Mona Lisa

The Italian sculpture gallery on the ground floor of the Denon wing holds the two unfinished marble captives carved by the Florentine master around 1513 for a papal tomb, figures that seem to struggle out of the stone, and the neoclassical marble of a winged youth reviving a girl with a kiss. Upstairs, the Grande Galerie runs for more than 400 metres along the Seine, hung with Italian Renaissance painting, and opens into the Salle des États, the largest room in the museum, where the Mona Lisa hangs behind glass on its own wall, facing the largest painting in the Louvre, a wedding feast covering seventy square metres.

The Mona Lisa is small, 77 by 53 centimetres, painted on a poplar panel between about 1503 and 1519 and left unfinished in the artist's hands when he died in France. The guide explains the smile, the landscape, the theft of 1911 and the crowd-management system, and helps you get to the front. Allow about twenty minutes for the room.

The French painting galleries

The red rooms next to the Salle des États hold the giant canvases of French painting from the Revolution to the Romantic age: the coronation of the emperor in Notre-Dame in 1804, painted on a canvas ten metres wide; the raft of survivors from a shipwreck of 1816 that scandalised the Salon with its realism; and the woman holding the flag over the barricades of 1830, the most famous image of the French Revolution of that year. Opposite them hang the great portraits of the age.

The guide reads these paintings as the newspapers of their day, explaining the politics behind each commission. It is the last gallery stop of the two-hour Louvre tour with an art historian and takes about fifteen minutes; from here the route passes back under the pyramid, where the guide leaves you with directions to the Egyptian rooms, the medieval moats or the apartments of the Second Empire if you wish to continue on your own.

The palace rooms and the Tuileries outside

Between the galleries the guide shows the building itself: the Cour Carrée with its Renaissance facades, the painted ceilings and gilded stucco of the former royal apartments, the Apollo Gallery with the crown jewels of France, and the way each king added a wing. The Louvre was the stage for royal weddings, plots and massacres, and the stories of the palace are part of this tour.

You meet at the Arc de Triomphe du Carrousel, the small triumphal arch of 1808 that once formed the gateway to the Tuileries Palace, burned in 1871 and never rebuilt; behind it the Tuileries Garden runs to the Place de la Concorde. How to get to the Louvre: metro lines 1 and 7 to Palais Royal–Musée du Louvre, then two minutes on foot to the arch, or line 1 to Tuileries. Best time to visit the Louvre: a weekday late morning, which is when this tour begins, or the late openings on Wednesday and Friday evenings when the galleries are at their quietest.