Musée du Louvre

The Winged Victory of Samothrace at the top of the Daru staircase

The revolution nationalised the royal collection in 1793 and opened the palace to the public, which invented the modern museum as a civic institution. Two centuries of acquisition later it holds thirty-five thousand works on display across three wings, with an accumulated logic that only makes sense if you accept that it was a palace first.

Most visitors go straight to one painting and see very little else. The Mona Lisa is behind glass in a room designed for crowd management and is, as an experience, a disappointment. The Winged Victory, the Sully medieval foundations, the Near Eastern galleries and the Richelieu sculpture courts are all extraordinary and all comparatively empty.