A visit to the Louvre can be a gastronomic adventure—if you know where to look

President Emmanuel Macron’s planned “new renaissance” of the Louvre lavishes a long overdue gift on its superstar work of art: at last, the Mona Lisa will be getting a room of her own.

Her new accommodations will grab the headlines, but the Louvre makeover is also great news for the unjustly overlooked roommate that faces her, Veronese’s “The Wedding Feast at Cana.” Not only is this sixteenth-century masterpiece the largest painting in the Louvre (at 732 square feet about the size of a one-bedroom Paris apartment), but it is also the most glorious food painting of the Italian Renaissance. The Mona Lisa is not scheduled to relocate until 2031 at the earliest, but once she does, visitors will have the time, space, and serenity to finally see—really see—”The Wedding Feast at Cana.”

Every time I gaze upon the “Wedding Feast,” I think about how delicious and satisfying it can be to discover the universe of food in the galleries of the Louvre. A museumgoer does not need to be an art expert to savor a still life of ripe strawberries or to find pleasure in a canvas of a joyous shared meal. Wander through the museum and you never know where you will find gastronomic cultures, identities, religious practices and traditions that transcend time and place.

As my friend, the author Stephen Heyman, once wrote in a review of a book about food and the Louvre, “after enduring 500 images of Saint Sebastian variously impaled with arrows, who hasn’t been perked up by the sight, in a 300-year-old painting, of a salacious raspberry or a noble artichoke?”

For a tour combining the appreciation of great art and good eating, the “Wedding Feast” is a fine place to start. The painting portrays Jesus performing his first miracle, turning water into wine at a wedding, but Veronese moved the action to a palace in Venice and added dozens of characters dressed in the clothing of his own time. The table, too, belongs to aristocratic Venice. Delicate glass goblets and pure gold and silver plates and serving vessels convey luxury. The individual napkins and table settings highlight the advanced state of Venetian culinary practices compared to those of northern Europe.

The guests have finished the main courses and talk among themselves as a final course— of quinces, grapes, dates, and sweetmeats—is spread out before them. It would be crude to show them eating; even a woman using a toothpick to free a morsel of food from a tooth keeps her mouth closed. In the foreground, a barefoot server dressed in gold bends over and pours the new wine from a large carved stone water jug into a smaller pitcher as the wine steward standing next to him holds up a stemmed glass to examine the miraculous, deep red liquid. In the center of the balcony level, directly above Christ, a carver cuts a large piece of lamb with a heavy knife. The guests are already on the dessert course, but the carver’s action symbolically foreshadows Christ’s crucifixion.

Hierarchy, protocol, wealth, local politics, and Christly power—all in a shared meal.

Once you’ve supped at Cana, head over to the ancient Egypt department for an early example of the “Mediterranean diet” of wheat bread, wine, olive oil, and cheese.

There, in Room 635 of the Sully wing, sits a painted limestone frieze from the tomb of Princess Nefertiabet. Wearing a long, tight leopard-skin dress that leaves her right shoulder and arm bare, she is seated in solitary splendor on a throne, a meal in front of her on an offering table filled with upright slices of white bread. The pantry behind her is stocked with beverages and foods she could enjoy for eternity, including beef, gazelle, venison, liver, goose, duck, fish, turtledoves, poultry, fruit, and cereals. The lavish provisions signal that the princess will continue to enjoy the pleasure of earthly food in her celestial life.

Move forward almost a thousand years in time to one of the most important works of the Louvre, the black stone stele carved in cuneiform script with the ancient legal text known as the Code of Hammurabi, in Room 227 of the Richelieu wing. Peering into the glass cases nearby, I discovered that Babylon’s Hammurabi was more than a king who created the most complete code of laws in antiquity; he was also an epicure. (His favorite treat was a strongly spiced quail tart.)

In a glass vitrine in the same room I spotted a shallow round dish decorated with four concentric circles and made of biscuit-colored white clay. In the center were indentations in the shape of animals—four with large ears that could have been donkeys and six with raised tails that could have been dogs. “Kitchen mold,” the label read. There was nothing unusual about this simple object, but its date jumped out at me. It was about 3,800 years old, found in what is now eastern Syria. Molds—with designs of animals and of pregnant women—were customarily used to make savory tarts and sweet cakes for the royals. And the ancient Mesopotamians, known for their wines, were the first known makers of beer and made the world’s first ice creams, too.

Where kingdoms and dynasties have not survived, royal eating utensils often have. In one display, in Room 527 of the Richelieu wing, I came across a 16th-century spoon and fork set from Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), carved from rock crystal and decorated with rubies set in gold. The spoon was the oldest eating utensil, the fork a more recent invention. At that time, Ceylonese craftsmen mainly worked in ivory to make such objects, but in this case, rock crystal was used, probably to emphasize rarity and royal prestige.

The Apollo Gallery, just around the corner from the “Winged Victory of Samothrace,” contains France’s crown jewels. The most beautiful jewel box in the world, the gilded gallery was built by King Louis XIV to show off his grandeur. But most of the crown jewels were sold off at auction in the 19^th century, so the room has been filled with the king’s exuberant collections of dishes, plates, and containers, some set in gold and carved from minerals or mineral aggregates like lapis lazuli, agate, amethyst and jade. They convey a sense of the grand couvert, a ridiculously artificial and formal ritual at Versailles: almost every evening King Louis XIV, usually with the queen and their progeny, dined in public. (His successor and great-grandson, Louis XV, preferred to dine alone.)

Vessels for food also feature prominently in the Islamic wing. Among the nearly three thousand objects on display are ceramic plates and jade bowls, glass bottles and metal pitchers and basins. A Persian inscription on a 16th-century concave ceramic plate, in Room 185 of the Denon wing, reads: “That this platter will always be full, always surrounded by friends, that they are lacking for nothing and that they enjoy everything well.” With its blue and yellow flowers nestled in green leaves, the plate would fit nicely in a cheery country kitchen.

The Louvre is a place to contemplate similarities between the chef and the artist. Both use their hands and transform raw materials into original works. Both use tools: the chef has utensils, the painter brushes and the sculptor chisels. Both are attentive to proper proportions—how heavily to season a soup, how rich a red to paint a roof.

Art has even borrowed from the language of eating. A painting may start maigre (thin), with the artist applying a background to the canvas. Then the painter tends to go toward the gras (fat), thickening the layers.

And the colors? Tones and shades evoke the vocabulary of the kitchen. Colors are cold or hot, acidic, sweet, sour, strong, suave (mellow). Once a painting is finished, it can seem tendre (tender), mousseuse (frothy), or sèche (dry). My favorite is the word “croûte.” The word has multiple meanings, including a worthless painting that has aged poorly, its surface hardened and damaged. To call a painting a croûte means it’s pretty bad.

In ancient Greece and Rome, an artist who could make physical objects like a carrot and a crock come to life was considered a great talent. But Christian Europe looked down on object art. For centuries, critics ranked still life painting below landscapes, daily life, portraits, and history paintings. But if you are interested in food, you will love the Louvre’s still-lifes.

Most of the Louvre’s still-lifes are relegated to an upper floor of the Richelieu and Sully wings, whose rooms are the least trafficked part of the museum’s painting collection. Even so, the curators there consider their collection the richest when it comes to food. One of my favorite rooms is 928 of the Sully wing, which holds a selection of paintings by Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin, the 18th-century master of still life. (The Louvre has more than 40 Chardins in its collection.) Peaches, pears, nuts, olives, grapes and pomegranates are a few of Chardin’s offerings here, as well as my favorite, his brioche.     

In researching the gastronomic universe of the Louvre, I contacted Guy Savoy, considered by some food critics to be the number one chef in the world, to analyze the relationship between food and art.

Before taking Savoy to the Louvre, I first took the Louvre to his restaurant on the other bank of the Seine.

Sébastien Allard, the Louvre’s director of paintings, joined Savoy and me at a table tucked in a corner of the kitchen. Savoy served his signature dish: thick artichoke soup with slices of black truffles and parmesan shavings, accompanied by a toasted mushroom brioche, for dipping, that is slathered with truffle butter.

As we were eating, I pulled out a book on art and gastronomy and turned to “The Brioche.”

The painting’s focus is a large circular loaf whose lopsided dark top makes it look as if the cook might have left it in the oven too long. A sprig of orange blossoms, the standard decoration for weddings, pierces the top of the brioche. On the left is a flowery, plump, hand-painted porcelain sugar pot symbolizing the bride as an open vessel; on the right, a thin phallic bottle containing a dark liquid. In front of the brioche are two ripe peaches, two cookies, a small biscuit, and three cherries. There is no sexual subtlety here.

Savoy looked hard at the copy of the painting. “The chef burned the brioche!” he exclaimed.

Allard looked as if he had been struck stiff by a bolt of lightning. “Chardin is almost the father of perfection, and to see his brioche as burnt is a brand-new interpretation of his art,” he said. “It’s revolutionary! I used to focus on the fixed, still life nature of the painting, but the state of the burnt brioche adds the idea that time flies.”

We were speaking in French, and Allard used the French expression for still life—nature morte—literally, “dead nature.” “The brioche died twice then!” Savoy said, laughing out loud.  

Allard stayed serious. “I’d say that the nature morte is actually a nature vivante”—a living nature, he said. “With this cold, overcooked, uneven brioche, Chardin captured the passing of time and the fragility of life.”

By the time we finished our multi-course meal, Allard and Savoy were exchanging stories—the joy of partage, the elusive concept that means “sharing.” “For me going to the museum is like hearing an opera, or eating a meal,” Allard said. “There is the unfolding of the event. The likelihood that something unexpected may happen.”

“It’s like going in a rush to see the Mona Lisa, that’s your goal,” Savoy responded. “But then, suddenly, you get lost. You come across a work that speaks to you of an atmosphere or a place. Like looking at a still life and dreaming about what to put on the table next.”

Soon after that, Allard took me and Savoy on a tour of the still lifes of the Louvre. Along the way, we stopped in the room with the Chardin painting of the brioche.

Just as in the photo in the coffee-table book, the brioche is definitely burnt.