Location: Rue de Rivoli, 75001 Paris, France

Opening Hour: 9am – 6pm Daily

Best Time to visit: Whole Year

Ticket: Euro 17 (Free for visitors 18 years old and below)

Public Transport: Palais-Royal – Musée du Louvre, Louvre – Rivoli

Others:

The main entrances to Louvre museum are the Pyramid, The Carrousel du Louvre and the Porte des Lions. For visitors who are using subway to the museum, the closest entrances will be the Pyramid and The Carrousel. Most visitors will choose to tour the Pyramid first before exploring the museum further, this entrance is always the most crowded entrance and the wait time could be longer.

To avoid the crowded Pyramid during peak times, visitors can use the Carrousel and Porte des Lions entrances instead to enter the museum.

Musée du Louvre – The most visited and the largest museum in the world

Home to the world most famous art pieces like Mona Lisa and the Venus de Milo, the Musée du Louvre (Louvre Museum) is not only the world’s most-visited museum by tourists around the world, but also the largest museum in the world. With a total areas of about 160,000 square meters, and it is so huge that it can hold more than 10000-15000 visitors at any one time. Holding close to 35000 pieces of artworks, it has successfully attracted more than 10million visitors from all over the world each year.

Original Building

Musée du Louvre is situated in the old royal palace of French monarchs, at 1st arrondissement of Paris, close to the les Halles district, sits along the banks of the Seine River.  Built and refurbished from a twelfth century fortress, it was actually the palace for King Charles V and Philippe II in the 16^th century. It was during this period, the King has started to accumulate more and more art collections in this palace. It was eventually converted to the world largest museum in 1793 after the King left.  

New Modern Building Design

The new modern building which features an impressive glass pyramid, was built in 1989, in the palace’s main courtyard. The glass architecture was actually designed by a Chinese architect named I.M.Pei. Today, this spectacular glass architecture has become a landmark and recorgizable part of the Parisian skyline. It is also the main entrance to the Musée du Louvre now.

This magnificent museum has total 73,000-square-meter exhibition space in three sections: the Denon, Richelieu, and Sully wings, with each wing has more than 70 rooms displaying paintings and artworks objects. There are also eight curatorial departments, all dedicated for the permanent displaying of 35,000 works of art.

The Art Collection

The Louvre Museum houses one of the most impressive art collections in history, includes everything from Greek, Roman, Egyptian and European artworks.

It holds a total of 380,000 objects in this huge building, of which about 35,000 pieces are on displayed to public, these includes exhibits sculptures, objects d’art, paintings, drawings and archaeological findings.

All these collections are organized according to different themes and placed in various departments: Greek Antiquities, Egyptian Antiquities, Roman and Etruscan departments as well as an Oriental Antiquities department.

Besides that, the Islamic art, ancient French furniture and crown jewels as well as Neoclassical 18th-century sculpture are also on displayed here. Not only that, the museum also exhibits a part of the actual palace, including a Middle Age’s Louvre.

Among the most important and best-known work of arts exhibits here including of:

1. Mona Lisa by Leonardo da Vinci
2. Liberty Leading the People by Eugune Delacroix
3. Veronese’s massive floor-to-ceiling painting called the Les Noces de Cana
4. The Wedding at Cana by Paolo Veronese
5. Jacques Louis David’s Le Sacre de Napoléon1er.
6. Portrait of Woman
7. The Raft of the Medusa

Visit here for the detail of the top paintings found in Musee du Lourve.

As for sculptures & statues, here are some of the most well-known on display:

1. Venus de Milo, an ancient Greek statue.
2. Seated Scribe, an ancient Egyptian sculpture.
3. Winged Victory of Samothrace, a Hellenistic sculpture
4. Sleeping Hermaphordite on Bed
5. Milo of Croton
6. Psyche Revived by Cupid’s Kiss
7. The Monzon Lion
8. The Winged Bulls

Visit here for the detail of the top sculptures found in Musee du Lourve.

With this amount of art pieces, it is impossible for a visitor to see all of them in one day. In fact, with the museum’s sheer size and amount of artworks on display, it may take more than 100 days to view all this artworks, without eat and sleep.  

If you are an art lover, you will not just spend 1 day in this huge museum with so much precious artwork for you to appreciate. So plan your trip properly and you might want to get an accommodation nearby so that you can travel to this museum frequently. Check out which hotels that you can stay around Musee du Lourve here.