Hooked on Art Podcast · Veronica Winters

The best art in the Louvre art museum

·34 min·3 clips

0s-60s

The Louvre takes two full days here. The host starts with the plain fact of walking: about 15 hours through palace rooms, hallways, galleries, and display cases. The size matters. Over 60,000 square meters and 35,000 works set up a museum that runs from ancient Egypt to 19th century art, with the famous pieces acting more like a doorway than the whole point. The Mona Lisa, Venus de Milo, Michelangelo's Dying Slaves, Canova's sculptures, and David's paintings are here, but the host keeps steering attention toward works that can get lost in the rush. The Assyrian rooms land especially hard. Excavated palace sculptures tied to King Sargon II and a capital later buried in sand come across as protective objects, but also as imperial objects. Their surfaces ask for some imagination too: the gray and brown reliefs once had blue, red, and white color. The winged bulls are treated with proper awe. Each weighs about 28 tons, carved from a single alabaster block, and their job as guardians gives the palace a more watchful feeling. Gilgamesh has a rough, powerful beauty in the high relief where he overpowers a lion. Even stripped of its old color, the scene still has force. Babylonian wall decorations widen the route before the host turns to Greco-Roman galleries spread through the museum. Classical art gets a slower backstory, shaped by French collectors, diplomatic missions, personal travel, wealthy gifts, and the Grand Tour to Italy and Greece. The episode ends outside the cases, with an art-supply shop, street views, and thanks to subscribers pulling the museum visit back into the host's own art practice.

As heard by us

A slow walk through the Louvre that favors scale, detail, and guided looking over spectacle.

The piece treats the Louvre as a place to be entered slowly, room by room, until the museum's scale becomes part of the point. It is at its best in the Assyrian reliefs, winged bulls, and classical galleries, where the writing uses those works to show how wide the museum's reach…

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Why you'd press play

Press play for a guided wander through the Louvre's rooms and hallways, beyond just the famous names.

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