The Louvre Museum is one of the largest and most popular art museum in the world. The museum is located in the center of Paris, on the right bank of the Seine, on Rivoli Street, in the 1st district of the capital. In 2018, the number of visitors to the Louvre exceeded 10 million people, which is a record. The museum building is an ancient royal palace.
The most famous museum of the planet, the symbol of Paris, the pride of France ... that's right - this is the Louvre. And also ... imagine 22 football fields at once; fill this space with tens of thousands of sculptures, paintings, jewelery, pottery and decor samples - in short, everything that humanity has produced in the last 5 thousand years; Imagine that every day two infantry divisions (25-30 thousand people) march through this territory. So - this is also the Louvre.
Why the Louvre is worth a visit
Almost 10 million people every year aspire to the Louvre, not only for the sake of Mona Lisa and Venus de Milo. The museum offers for inspection 35,000 paintings, statues, frescoes, engravings, prints. And this is only a small part: only a third of a million of them are in the museum funds (the picture is on average displayed for three months, and then sent to the store in order to avoid damage - the atmosphere in public halls damages the preservation of canvases). If you are strong, hardy and willing to spend up to 10 hours for inspection - each exhibit will get no more than a second of your time. Hence the logical conclusion: you need to plan an inspection in advance (and at the same time part with the idea of inspecting everything).
Of course, going to the museum is not a polar expedition, but careful preparation is still very desirable. And it begins with the selection of goals.
Here are the main sections of the museum:
Ancient East (art and culture of Iran, Mesopotamia and Levant. In this collection is a stele with carved laws of Hammurabi - the oldest monument to the rule of law);
Ancient Egypt (including the Hellenistic and Roman periods. Behind the world famous sphinx - here);
Ancient Greece and Rome (here is the Etruscan collection of monuments on display - there is simply no analogue to it in the world);
The Art of Islam (a relatively new collection, open to the public only in 2003);
Sculptures (almost immense collection of French and Italian statues - from the 6th to the middle of the 19th centuries);
Arts and crafts (tableware, furniture, tapestries, jewelry and, again, sculptures - for example, the famous equestrian statue of Charlemagne);
Graphic art: drawings, prints, prints ... in a word, everything that was not written in oils or watercolors on canvas (the most extensive collection of the museum);
Painting: in addition to the well-known Dzhokonda - 4 more paintings by Leonardo da Vinci, as well as paintings by Raphael, Titian, Correggio, El Greco, Goya, Delacroix and hundreds of others (about 6 thousand exhibits in total).
How not to get lost in the Louvre
First of all, you need to get a floor plan. It is simple, it is distributed free of charge at every entrance - the main thing is not to forget about it on emotions. If for some reason it was not possible to get hold of a cheat sheet, here are some tips:
Antique halls (plus East and Egypt) mainly occupy the first floor, painting and applied art - the second and third.
French works of art (again mainly) are concentrated in the north wing of the Louvre (“Richelieu’s wing”), Italian, including Gioconda, in the south (“Deon’s wing”, second floor).
In addition to the three above-ground floors, there is a fourth - ground floor. It is almost not visited by tourists. And in vain! After all, there is still possible to see the preserved part of the "old Louvre" - fragments of the walls of the fortress of the 12th century. And not only to see, but also to touch them.
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