Louvre

The museum is housed in the Louvre Palace (Palais du Louvre), which was originally a fortress built in the XII century in the era of Philip II. The remains of the fortress are still visible. The building was repeatedly expanded before taking the form of a modern Louvre Palace.

The museum was first opened to the public on November 8, 1793, during the French Revolution. Then an exposition of 537 paintings was presented. The size of the collection increased during the Napoleonic era, when the Louvre was renamed the Musée Napoléon.

Currently, the Louvre collection has more than 300,000 exhibits from different eras and civilizations, but only 35,000 are on display in the halls. Among them you can find bas-reliefs from Assyrian palaces, Egyptian painting and much more.

The most famous exhibits of the Louvre: the Code of Hammurabi, Venus of Milo, Nick of Samothrace, Gioconda (Mona Lisa) and other works by Leonardo da Vinci, paintings by Rembrandt, Titian, Liberty on the barricades of Delacroix.

For the past few years, the Louvre has topped the list of the most visited museums in the world, compiled by the influential British monthly magazine The Art Newspaper (TAN). In 2011, the museum was visited by 8.8 million art lovers.