Take a stroll through the Louvre’s awe-inspiring Grande Galerie and its magnificent history paintings will make you rethink art There are many places on Earth where art lovers feel they have to go. Cairo to see the face of King Tut, maybe, or New York’s MoMa to see Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. I have no regrets about my pilgrimages to such sites. But I have to confess that the place that makes me more aware than any other of the richness, glory and mystery of art is closer to home (just a Eurostar journey away), and far more complex in its pleasures. In the Grande Galerie of the Louvre you walk along an immense hall – divided in two by a central tribune – past a cavalcade of French history paintings. What is a history painting? Well, the best way to find out is to visit this part of France’s national museum. Here are paintings, many of them on a staggering scale, of great and noble, shocking and terrifying events. Survivors of a shipwreck lose their last shreds of hope as gargantuan waves bear down on their loosely slung together vessel in Géricault’s The Raft of the Medusa . Napoleon gives succour to the dying in Baron Gros’s Battlefield of Eylau . As the heroic Spartans prepare to lay down their lives, their leader sits brooding alone, staring right at us, in David’s great Leonidas at Thermopylae

Original Source Why I love the Louvre’s Grande Galerie