Paintings
European paintings from the 13th to the mid-19th century — the Italian, French, Flemish, Dutch, Spanish, and German schools.
Mona LisaLeonardo da Vinci · first quarter of the 16th century
Mona LisaLeonardo da Vinci · first quarter of the 16th century
The painting collection a kingdom spent four centuries assembling.
rançois I lured Leonardo to France with the Mona Lisa in his luggage; Louis XIV bought by the hundred; the Revolution and Napoleon brought the rest. What survives is the deepest reading of European painting in any one museum — Italy, the Low Countries, Spain, and above all France, hung in the rooms a court built to impress itself.
Move from a Cimabue gold-ground panel to Vermeer's lacemaker, then to David's frozen oaths and Géricault's raft pitching on a real swell. Each was meant to argue something — about faith, about a monarch, about a republic — and the arguments are still legible if you give them the wall time.
