The Louvre
One of the world’s great museums, spanning ancient civilisations to European masters.
The Louvre sits on the Right Bank of the Seine in the heart of Paris. It started life as a fortress built under King Philip II in the late 12th century. Later monarchs, beginning with Francis I in the 16th century, turned it into a grand royal palace. After the court moved to Versailles, the building slowly changed from a home for kings into a home for art, and during the French Revolution it opened to the public as a museum in August 1793.
It is often described as the largest art museum in the world, with about 72,000 square metres of galleries. The collections hold roughly half a million objects, and around 35,000 of them are on display at any time. They cover Near Eastern, Egyptian, Greek, Etruscan and Roman antiquities, Islamic art, sculpture, decorative arts, paintings, and prints and drawings. The range runs from the ancient world up to the mid-19th century.
The building itself tells the story of French architecture across eight centuries. In the 19th century Visconti and Lefuel expanded the palace, and the Grand Louvre project of the 1980s added I. M. Pei's glass pyramid in the Cour Napoléon as the new main entrance. It is still one of the most visited museums on the planet, drawing about nine million visitors in 2025.
Highlights
- Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa
- The Winged Victory of Samothrace at the top of the Daru staircase
- The Venus de Milo
- I. M. Pei's glass pyramid entrance (1989) in the Cour Napoléon
- The gilded Galerie d'Apollon, home of the French crown jewels
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