Louvre audio guide,
five stops, free.

You are standing in front of the most visited painting in the world, and the first surprise is how small she is. Seventy-nine centimetres by fifty-three. A poplar panel, not canvas, which is why the Louvre keeps her in a climate-controlled case behind glass, on a wall of her own, in the largest room in the museum.

The woman is Lisa Gherardini, the wife of a Florentine silk merchant named Francesco del Giocondo. Leonardo da Vinci started her portrait around 1503, when he was in his early fifties, and by most accounts never delivered it. He kept working on it for years, and when he moved to France in 1516 at the invitation of King Francis the First, the painting came with him. After Leonardo died at Amboise in 1519, it passed into the French royal collection, which is why the Mona Lisa lives in Paris and not in Florence.

Look at the edges of her face and hands. There are no hard outlines anywhere. Leonardo built the flesh out of dozens of thin translucent glazes, so that light seems to sit inside the skin rather than on top of it. He called the effect sfumato, from the Italian word for smoke. It is also the reason her expression refuses to settle. The corners of the mouth and the eyes are the parts of a face we read for mood, and Leonardo left them deliberately soft, so your own eye keeps finishing the smile in different ways.

Now look past her, at the landscape. On the left the horizon sits low, with a winding road. On the right it sits higher, with a bridge and water. The two sides do not line up. If you cover the left side, she seems to sit taller and calmer. Cover the right, and she seems smaller and closer. Nobody knows whether that was a game or a happy accident, but it is one of the reasons people say she changes when you move.

For most of the nineteenth century she was admired but not famous. What made her a celebrity was a crime. On the twenty-first of August 1911, a former Louvre workman named Vincenzo Peruggia hid in the museum overnight, lifted the panel off the wall, and walked out with it under his coat. For two years the empty space drew bigger crowds than the painting had. She turned up in Florence in December 1913, when Peruggia tried to sell her to a dealer. She came home to Paris, and she has been the most famous face in the building ever since.

The glass in front of you has its own story. In 1956 a visitor threw acid at the lower part of the panel, and later that year another threw a rock that chipped the paint near her left elbow. She has been protected ever since, and since 2005 she has had this wall to herself, with the Wedding at Cana filling the wall directly behind you.

One last thing before you turn around. The Louvre plans to move her to a new room of her own, built beneath the Cour Carrée, sometime around 2031. So this room, with the crowd, the phones, and the Veronese at your back, is how a whole generation has met her, and it will not be how the next one does.

This is not a painting of the French Revolution of 1789. It is the twenty-eighth of July 1830, the middle day of three days of street fighting in Paris that people still call the Three Glorious Days. Parisians threw up barricades and drove out King Charles the Tenth. Eugène Delacroix watched it happen, and by the autumn he was painting it. He wrote to his brother that he had taken on a modern subject, a barricade, and that if he had not fought for his country, at least he would paint for her.

The woman at the centre is not a real person. She is Liberty, an allegory, barefoot and bare-breasted like a classical goddess, but with a musket in one hand, the tricolour in the other, and a Phrygian cap on her head, the old symbol of a freed slave. What made the painting shocking in 1831 is everything around her. Real Parisians. A worker with a sabre. A student in a top hat, who some people think is Delacroix himself, though nobody has ever proved it. A boy with a pistol in each hand, who many readers believe inspired Victor Hugo's Gavroche when he wrote Les Misérables thirty years later. And under their feet, the dead, painted with no heroism at all.

Look to the far right, into the smoke. Those are the towers of Notre-Dame, with a tricolour flying from one of them, which places you precisely on the Right Bank, a few hundred metres from where you are standing now.

The French state bought the painting in 1831, then found it too inflammatory to hang for long, and it spent years out of sight. It became the image of the Republic anyway. It was printed on the hundred-franc note for nearly twenty years. And in 2024 it came back from a six-month restoration that removed layers of yellowed varnish. The sky is grey and blue again instead of brown, and the tricolour is the loudest thing in the room, which is exactly how Delacroix wanted it.

She was found in 1820 by a farmer on the Greek island of Milos, who was digging out stones from an ancient wall and hit marble. A French naval officer, Olivier Voutier, happened to be excavating nearby and helped pull her out of the ground, already in pieces and already missing her arms. The French ambassador in Constantinople bought her, presented her to King Louis the Eighteenth, and in 1821 she arrived at the Louvre.

The timing mattered. In 1815 France had been made to return the art Napoleon had looted, including the Medici Venus, which went back to Florence. The Louvre needed a great classical statue, and it promoted this one hard, as a masterpiece of the golden age of Greece. The truth is a little later and a little more interesting. She was carved around 150 to 125 BC, in the Hellenistic period, in Parian marble from the island of Paros, and a broken inscribed base found with her named a sculptor called Alexandros from Antioch on the Maeander. The base disappeared in the nineteenth century, and the attribution has been argued about ever since.

Look at her from the side. She was made in two main blocks, joined at the hips, with the arms and the left foot carved separately and attached. That is why the pieces came apart in the ground. Look at the twist of the body. The hips turn one way and the shoulders another, in a spiral that makes her look different from every angle, which is why the room is arranged so that you can walk all the way around.

Nobody knows what her arms were doing. The likeliest guess is that she is Aphrodite, Venus to the Romans, and that her left hand once held an apple, which is a nice pun, because the name Milos sounds like the Greek word for apple. She has left the building twice. During the Second World War she was hidden in a château in the Loire Valley, and in 1964 she travelled to Japan, where more than a million people queued to see her. Everything else about her, including exactly what she was holding, is still a guess.