The Art of the Portrait in the Louvre

New National Gallery of Greece? You had us at hello. 

Now, just a few months after opening your doors fresh from an 8-year absence and overflowing with twice as much exquisite modern Greek art as before, you’re wowing us again. This time with a hot collab with the world’s most-visited museum, the Louvre in Paris.

The renovated National Gallery has now activated its temporary exhibitions gallery in the basement (a 2,000 square metre space) to host its first international showcase which features weighty works by the likes of Botticelli, Veronese, Greco, Velasquez, Rembrandt, Goya, and Delacroix.

Fully titled, “Seeking immortality: The Art of the Portrait in the Collections of the Louvre”, the exhibition comprises 100 pieces on loan from the Louvre Museum that trace the evolution of humanity’s attempts to depict the face from early antiquity; right up through the Middle Ages to the Renaissance and Baroque periods. The exhibition is split into 13 thematic sections that home in on the social status of the portrait in each era. 

Visitors can time travel through 3,000 years of human history from the kingdoms of the Middle East and Egypt, through the Greco-Roman period (you’ll see funeral masks of the pharaohs and emblematic portraits of Homer and Alexander the Great). Marvel at the ostentatious official portraits of kings and nobles during the giddy Baroque days, and pay homage to famous paintings such as “Bonaparte au Pont d’ Arcole” by Antoine-Jean Gros, or the defining image of the French Revolution, “La Mort de Marat” by Jacques-Louis David.