Leonardo grabs the headlines, Apollon wins my heart

Leonardo da Vinci draws superlatives like pollen pulls bees, so it's no surprise that the Louvre went big on the marketing of its current show. It was supposed to be the biggest, most insightful, most comprehensive of all the many exhibitions put on to mark the 500th anniversary of the death of the ultimate Renaissance Man. Most tickets sold out well in advance. The hype is so big that this coming weekend ... the last of the show's run ... it will be open 24/7 from Friday morning to late Monday afternoon. And as a special treat, if you go between 9pm and 8:45 am you get in for free.

Fascinating idea. And, maybe, if you went at 4am you might actually have enough space to enjoy it. Because with normal attendance, even with the Louvre supposedly limiting numbers by time slots, the crowds were so intense it made the whole experience profoundly uncomfortable. As a consequence, even though there were some remarkable items on display, we enjoyed our time wandering around the Louvre's regular galleries more than our claustrophobic visit to this "landmark" exhibition.

The show is undeniably impressive. Leonardo may be one of the most famous artists in history, but his output was tiny: there are just 24 complete or nearly complete paintings attributed to him by general agreement. Some can't move (such as the Last Supper, since it's painted on a wall) and many are so valuable that either their owners won't take the risk of letting them travel, or the insurance is prohibitively expensive. By getting 11 of Leonardo's total on the exhibition's walls, with the Mona Lisa upstairs and available on the same entry ticket, the Louvre has worked some impressive magic. (Although if you caught the National Gallery's Leonardo show in 2011, you probably saw the better effort.)

You can't have a major exhibition with just 11 paintings, of course, so the curators have expanded the show with Leonardo's drawings ... which remain in numbers as prolific as his paintings are sparse ... works by his teacher and contemporaries he influenced, copies, works by his students, and true-to-size x-rays of both paintings in the exhibition and some that couldn't travel. You're advised of this from the very beginning, when the major work that greets you isn't a Leonardo but a monumental bronze of Jesus and doubting Thomas by Andrea Verrocchio, his teacher. (Legend says Leonardo modelled Thomas' foot.) The show is, essentially, exploring the whole "ecosystem" of Leonardo.

It's always a delight when exhibitions bring you items you may never see on your own, thus I particularly appreciated the Madonna and Child from the Hermitage. Leonardo did many variations on this theme, however, and my favourite item in the whole exhibition was the Lansdowne Madonna, which has emerged from a private collection and was once owned by the same family that gave their name to, and once lived in, my club in London. The painting is exquisite and I love the personal connection. It hangs next to another version called the Buccleuch Madonna, and it's great fun to compare the two. The X-rays are fascinating and, in the case of the Mona Lisa, arguably more interesting than the painting itself (top photo). My biggest smile came from an old friend: Verrochio's Tobias and the Angel, which usually hangs in London's National Gallery, and features a ghostly, half-completed, shaggy canine reputedly by the young Leonardo that's one of the great dogs in art. I've always loved the idea that dogs are angels' best friends as well as man's.

There are 160 marvellous works to see here, but the density of the crowd made appreciating them an

endurance test rather than a joy. It was particularly frustrating in the room that was primarily drawings, arranged in long rows of display cases with narrow aisles in between. The scrum was so intense we skipped the whole section. This is a shame, as many art critics will tell you that the most intriguing masterpieces lay there. But I've been lucky to see a lot of Leonardo drawings in my life (the majority on display here come from the Royal Collection in Windsor), and I just wasn't up for the physical fight needed to see these.

When you know you're going to be packing the crowds in, putting so many things that require close study in low cases with limited access was a poor curatorial decision. A higher hang of the major paintings would also have created a better line of sight over the shoulders in front of you. They could have learned a great deal from the designers of the King Tut exhibit I saw in London earlier this year.

The curators could also, one assumes, have put a tighter limit on numbers and raised the ticket cost. At €17, Leonardo was priced well below the £20 - £25 of most major British exhibitions, and came with the added benefit of admission into the rest of the Louvre. Which normally costs €17. Bafflingly good value for money. Perhaps too good?

Though Leonardo should have been my highlight of the day, that honour belonged to the Galerie d'Apollon in the Denon wing. This jaw-dropping, gold-gilt blockbuster of a room dates from the time of the "Sun King" Louis XIV and was an artistic trial run before he commissioned the similar, but even grander, Hall of Mirrors at Versailles. You won't be missing anything with this version, however, but the people. The room has been closed for 10 months for renovation and even when open it's off the natural route through the Denon wing, so many people miss it. (I've spent many hours wandering the Louvre and I never knew it was here.) While still full of appreciative visitors, it's nothing like the crowds in Leonardo or the even more horrific body-to-body crush at Versailles. You have time and space to take it all in; though the human brain has a hard time processing this much grandeur.

The hall is 200 feet long, its barrel vault almost 50 feet above you, and its walls and ceilings are covered with paintings of mythological allegory, great battles and portraits of the artistic worthies of France, surrounded by an astonishing array of life-sized, nearly three-dimensional stucco figures, all covered with gold gilt. Few spaces in the Louvre deliver as potent a reminder that this was once a royal palace.

If you can tear your eyes away from looking upwards, you'll find that the room holds some of the greatest treasures in the museum: Louis XIV's collection of objects made from semi-precious stone and what's left of the French crown jewels. Given France's penchant for revolution, it's amazing any of this stuff survived, much less ended up in the same room.

There's only one crown here from the monarchy before Louis XVI lost his head, as the rest of his stuff was broken up during the political upheaval that followed. The regimes after that seem to have over-compensated for their feared inadequacies, much to the modern viewer's benefit. Louis Philippe presented his Bourbon queen with a set of diamonds and Sri Lankan sapphires that is the stuff of fantasy. The Empress Eugénie’s crown is a masterpiece of emeralds, diamonds and golden eagles with raised wings. Her diamond brooch is comprised of stones so big it's hard to believe they're real, though the refracted rainbows sparking out of them thanks to small, cleverly placed spotlights leave no doubt.

The Sun King's stones may seem humble next to this bling, but they are extraordinary in their own right. Lapis lazuli, malachite, agate and rock crystal have been painstakingly carved into goblets, bowls, boxes and other lovely little objects, then accented with gold and precious jewels. Any one of these would be a priceless treasure in most museums. Here, they're fighting with the architecture to get noticed. It's sensory overload, and it's glorious.

The Denon wing is also the home of a magnificent Roman sculpture collection, the galleries featuring the enormous history paintings of Jacques Louis David and Leonardo's most famous work, the Mona Lisa.

She hangs in the middle of an enormous gallery dedicated to the Italian Renaissance. The Louvre has recently renovated the gallery and instituted a new queuing system to see her. There's now an enormous one-way route so you can only enter the gallery through one door, and leave through the other. She hangs higher than before, so people who don't want to wait can see her from a distance. There's an amusement park style chicane of barriers organising the shuffling file of hundreds, who all wind their way forward to get their requisite selfie with the most famous painting in the world. Few of them bother looking at the rest of the gallery to see Veronese's monumental Wedding at Cana (for me, the best painting in the room) or the wall of luscious Titians. This isn't art appreciation, it's tourists ticking boxes.

I'm glad I had a chance to see the Leonardo exhibition. Seeing the Mona Lisa "live" is better than consuming her through thousands of tacky reproductions. But what my day at the Louvre really reinforced is that in this era of social media-driven tourism and uncomfortable over-crowding, the less appreciated experiences, off the beaten track, can be more meaningful than the "must sees".