The Louvre

 The Louvre in Paris is the biggest museum in the world and it has the most impressive art collections and masterpieces of history. It’s also a remarkable baroque-style palace as well as a museum and it sits along the banks of the Seine River in Paris. It is one of the city’s biggest tourist attractions. It was originally a fortress built in 1190. Later on in 16th century, it was reconstructed to serve as a royal palace. “Like many buildings, it was built and rebuilt over the years,” said Tea Gudek Snajdar, an Amsterdam-based art historian, museum docent and a blogger at Culture Tourist. When the museum served as a royal palace, it grew tremendously. Every Monarch in history expanded Louvre for their own use. It is known that today it covers a total area of 652,300 square feet (60,600 square meters). In 1682, Louis XIV decided to move the royal residence to Versailles. That was the time The Louvre became a house of art. Many art academies and exhibitions have been held until today. The National Assembly inaugurated The Louvre as a museum in August 1793 with a collection of 537 paintings. It was closed for some time in 1796 and then Napoleon reopened it with a new name, “Musée Napoléon”. “It was Napoleon Bonaparte who created the foundation for the world famous museum the Louvre is today,” said Gudek Snajdar. He actually wanted to be in charge of the art collections in history that is why he renamed it. After Napoleon, The Louvre continued to expand, and then regained its name. Today The Louvre collection has so many important pieces from Egyptian antiques, Roman and Greek sculptures, Islamic Art; Sculptures; Decorative Arts; Paintings; and Prints and Drawings, according to the Louvre website. Without any doubt, the most important and famous art work in the Louvre is Da Vinci’s “Mona Lisa”. Millions of visitors every year visit The Louvre to see her enigmatic smile. Because of its size, it is really impossible to pay a visit and see everything at one shot. If you want to see all the art collections, you should think about visiting it at least twice. Almost 8 million people visit it in a year. So be prepared for the crowd!