Louvre: 10 Artworks and the Stories Behind Them

Leonardo da Vinci painted this portrait on a panel of poplar wood. It is held in the Louvre in Paris and depicts Lisa Gherardini, the wife of the Florentine merchant Francesco del Giocondo. Her married name explains the Italian title La Gioconda. Leonardo softened transitions with the technique known as sfumato. The contours of the face seem to dissolve rather than end in a hard line. The wooden support also makes conservation part of the story. The Louvre protects the painting in a case with controlled temperature and humidity because the panel has warped and developed a crack.

The missing arms leave a question in the middle of this marble figure. Without the objects she once held, her identity cannot be read with complete certainty. The Louvre presents her as Aphrodite, the Greek goddess whom the Romans called Venus. The statue was found on the island of Melos in 1820 and entered the museum the following year. Drapery gathers around the lower body while the torso turns above it. That movement gives the figure a changing outline from different angles. Her familiar name combines a Roman goddess with the island where the sculpture came to light.

A marble goddess stands on the prow of a ship. Her clothing presses against her body and streams behind it, making stone suggest a strong wind. This is Nike, the Greek personification of victory, found on Samothrace in 1863. The monument belonged to a sanctuary on the island. Its naval setting explains the ship-shaped base, but the exact victory it celebrated remains uncertain. The head and arms are missing. The surviving body and wings still establish a powerful direction of movement, which the Louvre's monumental staircase turns into a dramatic encounter between sculpture and architecture.

The figure sits cross-legged with a writing surface across his lap. His alert eyes make the small sculpture feel unusually present. Carved in limestone and painted, the Seated Scribe comes from ancient Egypt's Old Kingdom and was discovered at Saqqara. The name describes the pose rather than identifying the man. His precise identity remains unknown. The work preserves the image of someone ready to write, with the body arranged around that task. Its materials matter as much as its posture: the inlaid eyes catch light differently from the painted stone around them, strengthening the impression of attention.

This dark stone stands more than two metres high. A carved scene at the top shows the Babylonian king Hammurabi before Shamash, the sun god associated with justice. Below it, writing covers the surface. Dating to around 1750 BC, the text gathers decisions about family, property, trade and other parts of life. Calling it a code is convenient, but it is not a modern legal code built around equal citizenship. The monument also presents a ruler as the guarantor of justice. It was found at Susa, in present-day Iran, after having been carried there in antiquity as war booty.

Veronese turned a biblical wedding into a vast scene of architecture, music and richly dressed guests. Christ sits at the centre, while activity spreads across the canvas. The painting was made for the refectory of the monastery of San Giorgio Maggiore in Venice. Its scale suited a communal dining room: it is over six metres high and almost ten metres wide. That size also shaped its later history. French forces removed it during the Napoleonic campaigns, and it stayed in France after the Empire fell through an exchange involving another painting. Its journey belongs beside its colours in any account of the work.

Théodore Géricault chose a recent catastrophe rather than a distant heroic legend. The wreck of the French frigate Méduse in 1816 left people adrift on a makeshift raft. His painting builds from exhausted and dead bodies towards figures straining to signal for help. Hope appears at the edge of physical collapse. Géricault prepared the work through encounters with survivors and close studies of bodies, including visits to morgues. Those preparations help explain the uncomfortable weight of the scene. The painting asks viewers to face suffering on the scale usually reserved for grand historical subjects, without making that suffering look clean or easy.

The woman with the tricolour steps over a barricade and leads an armed crowd. Eugène Delacroix combines a symbolic figure with people who appear to belong to the streets of Paris. The event behind the painting is the July Revolution of 1830, not the revolution of 1789. The uprising helped bring down Charles X. Liberty is therefore both an allegory and a presence within a specific political struggle. The raised flag draws the eye upward, while bodies below keep the cost of the fighting visible. The image can speak beyond its moment, but that wider meaning should not erase its historical setting.

Jacques-Louis David painted imperial ceremony on an enormous scale. The scene takes place in Notre-Dame in Paris during the coronation of 2 December 1804. Napoleon stands at the centre holding a crown above the kneeling Joséphine. Rows of richly dressed witnesses turn the event into a public statement of authority. The title can mislead a first glance: the central action concerns Joséphine's crowning. Like other official images of power, the painting is a constructed account, not a neutral camera view. Its arrangement of bodies, clothing and sacred space makes the new imperial order look deliberate, solemn and established.

Antonio Canova made marble carry a suspended embrace. Cupid bends towards Psyche, who reaches up and frames their faces with her arms. His wings and her reclining body create crossing lines around that central encounter. The subject comes from the ancient story of Cupid and Psyche, whose trials separate the lovers before their final union. Canova chose a moment of return to life and tenderness rather than a crowded retelling of the whole tale. The sculpture rewards movement around it: arms, wings and the supporting rock form different openings as the angle changes, while the faces remain the emotional centre.