Louvre Museum

The Louvre Museum (French: Musée du Louvre) is one of the largest and most popular art museums in the world. Located in the center of Paris, on the right bank of the Seine River, it occupies the former royal palace of the same name.

History

The concept of a museum to house the masterpieces of the Crown collection was conceived by the Earl of Angiviller, general director of the King's Buildings, between 1775 and 1776. However, it wasn't until 1793 that the Central Museum of the Arts of the Republic in the Louvre Palace was inaugurated.

Collections

The museum's collections cover a vast geographical and temporal span, from western Europe to Iran through Greece, Egypt, and the Middle East; from antiquity to 1848. The Louvre is one of the oldest museums with a rich history of collecting artistic and historical relics of France, from the Capetian dynasty to the present day.

The museum's holdings include Western art of the Middle Ages up to 1848, as well as the arts of ancient civilizations that preceded and influenced it (eastern, Egyptian, Greek, Etruscan, and Roman), the arts of early Christians and Islam. The Louvre retains more than 550,000 works of art, with over 35,000 on display at any given time.

Architecture

The building of the museum is the ancient royal palace (Palais du Louvre). The equestrian statue of Louis XIV marks the beginning of the so-called historical axis of Paris. The museum's exposure area is approximately .

Attendance

In 2018, the number of visitors to the Louvre exceeded 10 million, setting a record for the most visited museum in the world.

References

Note: I've kept the original formatting and structure of the source snippets as much as possible while synthesizing them into a cohesive article.