The biggest museums in the world. The largest museum The largest museums in the world top 10

State Hermitage, Saint Petersburg

The annual rating The Art Newspaper collected information on the largest museums in the world for 2016 and revealed patterns. The Louvre, despite any terrorist attacks, is still the most visited museum in the world. The Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York) displaced the British Museum (London) from second place, the Vatican Museums skipped ahead of the London National Gallery. The State Hermitage is firmly in the top ten, and the Reina Sofia Art Center (Madrid) managed to jump into the last carriage.

MoMA and the Metropolitan Museum had to move

Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

The Whitney Museum of American Art, which moved to a new building in midtown Manhattan in 2015, made room for the traditionally dominant New York Museum contemporary art(MoMA) and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The Whitney Museum hosted five of New York's ten most visited exhibitions of 2016.

However, despite the meteoric rise of the Whitney Museum, the MoMA and the Met remain leaders among New York's museums. In the first place is still MoMA - thanks to the employees who every day during the long weekend in October performed the production of the French choreographer Jérôme Bel. This performance attracted up to 6.8 thousand people a day. The more traditional Picasso Sculpture exhibition, which was held in the same place, organized jointly with the Picasso Museum in Paris, was visited daily by about 5.9 thousand people.

Paris and Brussels are slowing down, Madrid is on the rise

Louvre, Paris

The decrease in the flow of foreign tourists after a series of terrorist attacks continues to affect the attendance of the Louvre, but it still tops the list of the most popular museums in the world with 7.4 million visitors in 2016 (in 2015 this figure was 8.6 million). Since 2014, attendance at the main French museum has fallen by almost 2 million people, which means a significant drop in ticket revenues - while the cost of keeping the public safe has risen sharply. Attendance at the Musée d'Orsay also fell from 3.4 million in 2015 to 3 million last year. But the Pompidou Center, which is celebrating its 40th anniversary this year, is less dependent on tourists from the US, China and other countries. Its attendance in 2016 increased by 275 thousand people and amounted to 3.3 million.

The terrorist attacks in Brussels last March also seem to have affected the number of visitors to the Royal Museums. fine arts, which includes several venues, including the Magritte Museum and the Museum of Modern Art. Attendance at the Belgian museum cluster has fallen by more than a quarter, from 776,000 in 2015 to 497,000 in 2016.

But the largest museums in Madrid, on the contrary, are on the rise. In 2016, the Reina Sofia Center for the Arts received 400,000 more visitors (3.7 million) than in 2015, and the Prado passed the 3 million threshold, something it has not been able to do since 2012. About 600 thousand people - or a fifth of the total number of visitors for the year - came to the Prado for a large-scale exhibition " Hieronymus Bosch”, dedicated to the 500th anniversary of the death of the artist.

Successes and failures in London

Courtyard of the British Museum, London

A slight decline in the number of visitors to the British Museum and an increase in the number of visitors to the Metropolitan Museum of Art means that London and New York are now going head to head. The Met does not share attendance at three of its sites: the main one on Fifth Avenue, the Cloisters in Upper Manhattan, and the Metropolitan Breuer, which opened last year. Together they attracted a record 7 million people. And having only one site, the London British Museum was visited for last year 6.4 million viewers.

National Gallery in London has recovered from the 2015 strikes that resulted in many of its venues being temporarily closed. With nearly 6.3 million visitors, it still outpaces the recently expanded Tate Modern, which has a record total attendance of 5.9 million. According to our data, the Tate Modern remains the world's most popular contemporary and modern art museum.

Place in the ranking	Total number visitors	Museum	City
1	7 400 000	Louvre	Paris
2	7 006 859	Metropolitan Museum*	NY
3	6 420 395	British museum	London
4	6 262 839	National Gallery	London
5	6 066 649	Vatican Museums	Vatican
6	5 839 197	Tate Modern	London
7	4 665 725	National Museum imperial palace	Taipei
8	4 261 391	National Art Gallery	Washington
9	4 119 103	State Hermitage	Saint Petersburg
10	3 646 598	Reina Sofia Art Center	Madrid
11	3 443 220	somerset house	London
12	3 396 259	National Museum of Korea	Seoul
13	3 335 509	Pompidou Center	Paris
14	3 033 754	National Prado Museum	Madrid
15	3 022 086	Victoria and Albert Museum	London
16	3 000 000	Musee d'Orsay	Paris
17	2 788 236	Modern Art Museum	NY
18	2 714 271	National Museum folk art Korea	Seoul
19	2 668 465	National Gallery of Victoria*	Melbourne
20	2 623 156	National art center Tokyo	Tokyo
21	2 478 622	Museums of the Moscow Kremlin	Moscow
22	2 370 051	National Galleries of Scotland*	Edinburgh
23	2 325 759	State Tretyakov Gallery	Moscow
24	2 259 987	Rijksmuseum	Amsterdam
25	2 246 646	Soumaya Museum	mexico city
26	2 216 880		Rio de Janeiro
27	2 076 526	Van Gogh Museum	Amsterdam
28	2 023 467	J. Paul Getty Museum*	Los Angeles
29	2 011 219	Uffizi Gallery	Florence
30	1 949 330	National Portrait Gallery	London
31	1 926 844	Tokyo National Museum	Tokyo
32	1 876 908	shanghai art museum	Shanghai
33	1 810 948	National Museum of Scotland	Edinburgh
34	1 800 000	Art Institute of Chicago	Chicago
35	1 592 101	Los Angeles County Museum of Art	Los Angeles
36	1 461 185	Academy Gallery	Florence
37	1 409 849	Acropolis Museum	Athens
38	1 402 251	San Francisco Museum of Fine Arts*	San Francisco
39	1 349 663	Art Gallery New South Wales	Sydney
40	1 333 559	Doge's Palace	Venice
41	1 316 127	Australian Center for Moving Images	Melbourne
42	1 285 595	Royal Academy of Arts	London
43	1 267 280	Royal Museum Ontario	Toronto
44	1 259 318	Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum	Glasgow
45	1 240 419	Queensland Art Gallery/GoMA*	Brisbane
46	1 234 443	National Museum of Castel Sant'Angelo	Rome
47	1 205 243	Modern Art Museum	Sydney
48	1 200 000	National Portrait Gallery/SAAM	Washington
49	1 187 621	Serpentine Gallery	London
50	1 171 780	National Museum of Modern Art (MMSA)	Seoul
51	1 169 404	Guggenheim Museum	Bilbao
52	1 164 793	Museum of Fine Arts	Boston
53	1 162 345	National Museum Western art	Tokyo
54	1 154 031	Gazebo	Vein
55	1 151 922	Quai Branly Museum	Paris
56	1 151 080	Whitney Museum of American Art	NY
57	1 134 234	Dali Theater Museum	Figueres
58	1 133 200	Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts**	Moscow
59	1 130 556	National Galleries of the Grand Palais	Paris
60	1 122 826	Cultural Center of the Bank of Brazil	Brasilia
61	1 081 542	Tate Britain	London
62	1 066 511	University Museum of Modern Art	mexico city
63	1 050 000	National Art Museum of China	Beijing
64	1 040 654	Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum	Madrid
65	1 011 172	Imperial War Museum	London
66	1 006 145	Museum of the Berardo Collection	Lisbon
67	1 003 376	Saatchi Gallery	London
68	991 149	Palazzo Reale	Milan
69	965 929	Cultural Center of the Bank of Brazil	Sao Paulo
70	960 354	Museum of Fine Arts	Houston
71	958 353	Tomiv Otake Institute	Sao Paulo
72	954 895	Picasso Museum	Barcelona
73	953 925	Guggenheim Museum	NY
74	933 683	Montreal Museum of Fine Arts	Montreal
75	921 950	Ullens Center for Contemporary Art	Beijing
76	910 561	National Museum of the Republic	Brasilia
77	900 000	São Paulo Biennale Foundation	Sao Paulo
78	885 798	Petit pale	Paris
79	875 000	Modern Art Museum	San Francisco
80	873 627	Art Gallery of Ontario	Toronto
81	860 000	Ashmolean Museum	Oxford
82	858 632	Gyeongju National Museum	Gyeongju
83	855 810	Hong Kong History Museum	Hong Kong
84	852 095	Egyptian Museum	Turin
85	835 606	Århus Art Museum ARoS	Aarhus
86	820 516	National Art Museum of Catalonia	Barcelona
87	806 087	Huntington Library	San Marino (USA)
88	802 722	liverpool museum	Liverpool
89	780 879	Birmingham Museum	Birmingham
90	780 000	Orangerie Museum	Paris
91	780 000	Art Gallery of South Australia	Adelaide
92	775 043	Philadelphia Museum of Art	Philadelphia
93	770 714	National Museum in Krakow	Krakow
94	769 119	Museum of Art History	Vein
95	767 590	Minneapolis Institute of Art	Minneapolis
96	765 000	Renwick Gallery	Washington
97	758 300	German Historical Museum	Berlin
98	755 577	National Gallery of Ireland	Dublin
99	753 944	Caixa Forum Cultural Center	Barcelona
100	753 252	Museum Broad	Los Angeles

*Institutions located in several buildings are marked with an asterisk. The table shows their summarized indicators. Selected figures are: National Gallery of Victoria (International National Gallery of Victoria - 1,985,005, Ian Potter Centre: Australian National Gallery of Victoria - 683,460); National Galleries of Scotland (National Gallery of Scotland - 1,544,069, National Gallery of Modern Art in Scotland - 503,763, National Portrait Gallery of Scotland - 322,219); J. Paul Getty Museum (Getty Center - 1,569,565, Getty Villa - 453,902); Art Gallery of Queensland/GoMA (Art Gallery of Queensland - 572,762, Art Gallery of Contemporary Art Queensland - 667,657). The Metropolitan Museum of Art (Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Cloisters, Met Breuer) and the San Francisco Museum of Fine Arts (De Young Museum and the Legion of Honor) - separate data not provided.

There are huge museums under open sky, and there are popular wax museums. Each country can be proud of its largest museum, among them the largest in the world has been chosen.

The largest open air museum

Among open-air museums, skansens occupy a special place. There are such museums in many countries. They are museums of original national culture in the form of villages, where you can see how the people of a particular country lived many years ago. Getting into the skansen, tourists see not only appearance houses, they can inspect them interior decoration, outbuildings thus feeling the old way of life.

the largest in Eastern Europe skansen "Pirogovo" is considered. It is located on one of the outskirts of Kyiv. The total area of ​​the museum is one hundred and fifty hectares. In total, there are more than three hundred objects in Pirogovo. The uniqueness of this skansen also lies in the fact that it represents the whole of Ukraine, and not its separate region. The museum differs from similar skansens in other countries by the presence of theatrical performances. Religious and folk holidays. All museum objects are authentic and brought there from many regions of Ukraine. During the year, Pirogovo is visited by at least one hundred and thirty thousand tourists. Four hours is barely enough for a cursory tour of the museum. For comparison, the largest skansen in America is located in Wisconsin, it features about sixty objects.

The Ancient Siam Museum-Park is recognized as the largest in the world. The second name of this open-air museum is Muang Boran. This is one of the attractions of Bangkok. This amazing place presents miniature copies of ancient buildings and temples of Siam, Cambodia and Laos. Visitors have the opportunity to view all the exhibits by riding a bicycle or using the services of an electric car and a guide. The entire territory of this museum-park is about one square kilometer. On its territory there are more than a hundred famous monuments and attractions in Thailand.

The largest museum in Russia

The most famous in Russia and the largest museum in the country is the Hermitage. The year of its foundation is 1764. The number of exhibits of this gigantic museum is approaching three million. The beginning was laid by the acquisition of a large collection of paintings in Berlin by Catherine II. The collection included two hundred twenty-five paintings. Over the centuries, the museum has been replenishing its pantries and storerooms with more and more new exhibits.

Today, the museum's collection contains works by Rembrandt, Cezanne, Pizarro, Leonardo da Vinci, Monet, and others. A large area was required to accommodate all the exhibits. The museum occupies several buildings, the central among them is the Winter Palace. This large museum is located in the northern capital and is its decoration and a kind of brand of Russia.

The largest museum in the USA

Among art museums world prominent place is occupied by the Metropolitan Museum of Art. He is located in New York. The year of its foundation is 1870. The Metropolitan Museum of Art is always very crowded. To view the entire exhibition, art lovers need to visit it every day for a week, and stay there throughout the day.

world fame the museum began to acquire at the beginning of the twentieth century, which was facilitated by a considerable number of unique exhibits. There is a painting by Auguste Renoir, five works by Jan Vermeer. The number of works of art of this museum has already exceeded two million.

The largest wax museum

Madame Tussauds is recognized as the largest wax museum in Europe and the world. Its main exposition is located in London and has at least one thousand exhibits. This museum has many branches in major cities, namely - in Amsterdam, New York, Berlin, Las Vegas, etc.

The museum began with thirty figures that could "live" no more than two or three years. Madame Tussauds and her sons opened a museum in London in 1835. Only after the death of Tussauds, her sons invented a way to fix the wax, thanks to which the collection was expanded. Museum figures - not only historical figures, but also famous musicians, politicians, scientists, porn actresses, etc.

The largest tank museum

It is in Russia that the world's largest tank museum is located. Its name is the museum in Kubinka. It is located in the Moscow region. It has the richest collection historical technology. The complete collection deserves interest. military equipment fascist Germany. It is also located there unique collection technology of militaristic Japan, namely, armored vehicles. Most of the exhibits are unique and are the only ones in the world.

Visitors can get acquainted with the experimental developments of domestic armored vehicles, which for a long time were inaccessible to ordinary citizens. Unfortunately, a number of exhibits have been lost, including the first Russian Lebedenko tank, which resembles a huge chariot. It is possible that once lost exhibits will be reconstructed.

The largest museum in the world

A lot has been written about the largest museum in the world, the Louvre. However, judging by the territory of the museum, the Louvre takes only third place. You can estimate the size of the museum by its height, or by the number of visitors. There are many opinions on this matter. Nevertheless, the Louvre in Paris continues to be considered the largest.

It is known that it covers an area of ​​more than one hundred and sixty thousand square meters. There are almost four hundred thousand exhibits in its catalog. For the convenience of its inspection, the Louvre is divided into seven large parts. It is considered the center of the spiritual and artistic heritage humanity.

And the most expensive painting in the world was painted in 1948.
Subscribe to our channel in Yandex.Zen

Hello dear guys! And to you, dear adults, also a big and warm hello!

Probably each of you at least once was in the museum. Every day around the world, thousands of tourists line up in long lines to see works of science and art, visit various exhibitions and then exchange their impressions of what they saw.

Many of the cultural attractions are known for their fame around the planet. Do you know those - those where any traveler would like to go?

I propose to recall the most famous museums in the world, scattered across different countries, so that when you are going on a long journey, you can plan a visit to them in your excursion program. Well, right now, so that you can talk about them in an interesting and exciting way in class.

So, the top ten of the most famous of the well-known, according to the ShkolaLa blog.

Lesson plan:

Paris Louvre

Once a medieval fortress, and then the residence of the French kings, it opened to visitors in 1793. 160106 square meters of the total area occupied, more than 400 thousand exhibits presented - all this is about the great and bewitching Louvre!

Its centrally located glass pyramid attracts about 9.5 million visitors every year and becomes a photographic attraction as one of the symbols of Paris. This is the place where one of the world's artistic mysteries is located - da Vinci's painting "Mona Lisa".

Today, the Louvre has seven huge departments, in which it is possible, as they say, to examine in detail the exhibition items in just a week, no less. Here are present:

• Department applied arts;
• halls of painting, graphics and sculpture;
• the art of Ancient Egypt and the Ancient East;
• Islamic and Greek departments;
• Roman hall;
• and culture of the Etruscan Empire.

Vatican Museums in Rome

The exhibition complex has 1,400 halls and 50,000 objects are located in them. Get ready to walk about 7 kilometers to see all the exhibits.

heart the Vatican Museum The Sistine Chapel is considered to be a monument of the Renaissance, the walls of which were painted by Michelangelo. You can reach it only by overcoming the entire museum corridor.

Started building italian museum back in the 4th century - then the first stones of the church of St. Peter were laid, only in the 9th century did the walls appear, and by the 13th century they lined up in the papal Vatican residence. Every year, about 5 million visitors come here to see with their own eyes the treasures collected by Roman Catholics over several centuries.

British Museum in London

Opened in 1759 exhibition center a rather complicated story, and there are dark spots in the characterization. It is called not only a museum of all civilizations, but also a repository of stolen masterpieces.

This is the place where the cultural objects of Egypt, Greece, Rome, Asia and Africa are located, as well as medieval Europe. Only now, many of the 8 million exhibits appeared in the British Museum in a far from honest way. So, the ancient Egyptian Rosetta stone, however, like some other assets from Egypt, came here after being taken from Napoleon's army.

From Greece, with the strange permission of the Turkish ruler, precious sculptural expositions were taken to London.

By the way, admission to the British Museum is absolutely free.

Japanese National Museum in Tokyo

Dedicated to nature and science, it differs in that, along with the wonders of technology, there are stuffed animals, found remains of dinosaurs and their models.

Here on the roof of a six-story building you will find Botanical Garden with sun umbrellas that open automatically when approached. There is a "forest hall" where you can wander among the rich flora.

In the global gallery you can follow the evolution of all life on Earth and get acquainted with modern technologies, and in Japanese learn historical facts about the land of the rising sun.

And this museum is also included in the list of famous places, because visitors can become scientists for a moment and personally conduct a series of experiments.

American Metropolitan

This museum is located in New York and is rightfully one of the most famous. Judge for yourself: Paleolithic artifacts are collected here, which are adjacent to modern exhibits from the field of pop art, there are cultural objects from Africa, the East and Europe, paintings from the 12th to the 19th centuries, musical instruments, weapons and clothing of the peoples of five continents.

The museum appeared thanks to a group of entrepreneurs, public figures and artists who donated their collections to him, and they were replenished with two million exhibition items. In general, there is something to see here!

The area of ​​the cultural heritage of America is divided by luxurious passages and stairs that combine buildings from different times with tall columns, fountains and stained glass windows. Moreover, its name has nothing to do with underground transport, but is derived from the word "metropolis", that is, "big city".

Madrid Prado Museum

Spanish Cultural Center painting has collected under one roof more than 7600 paintings, 1000 sculptures, 8000 drawings, 1300 pieces of art. It got its name from the park of the same name in which it is located.

Although there are no elegant interiors and gilded staircases, the museum has a huge number of collections of paintings from different European schools: Spanish, Italian, German, British, most of which were collected by the church and representatives of the royal family.

By the way, there is a copy of the Mona Lisa in the Louvre, drawn by a student of Leonardo da Vinci.

Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam

Main state museum Holland is located in an ancient palace with towers and relief sculptures and is divided into 200 halls, where many masterpieces of Dutch and world art are located. The red brick building stands on the canal embankment and stretches for an entire block.

The main masterpiece of the Amsterdam Museum is Rembrandt's painting " The night Watch».

There are also canvases by artists of the Golden Age. And the exhibition halls abound with various antique gizmos from antique furniture to porcelain tableware.

Petersburg Hermitage

Russia, too, can rightfully enter the list and boast of a museum heritage known throughout the world. The Russian cultural giant is famous for the world's largest collection of paintings. Here you can get acquainted with the history from the Stone Age to the present, and the Golden Room - separate story, because there are collected jewels Russian empire and not only!

The Hermitage originates from the collection of Empress Catherine II and, having subsequently expanded, today it is a museum complex of six buildings, where more than 3 million exhibits are presented.

Cairo Museum

This cultural site was until recently famous for its complete collection of Egyptian art, which contains thousands of treasures from the tombs of Tutankhamun.

Before the revolution in Egypt in Cairo Museum there were more than 120,000 ancient exhibits, including monumental sculptures of the Sphinx ancient period, tombs and mummies of Egyptian pharaohs, jewelry of queens.

One can only hope that the Egyptian nation will be able to preserve its heritage.

Archaeological Museum in Athens

This is the largest cultural center in Greece, which houses exhibits from different eras, but the collections of ceramics and sculpture are on the list of the richest in the world.

The diverse collections of the museum include finds as far back as 6800 BC, among which are clay, stone and bone vessels, weapons, jewelry and tools.

Various museum items

Today we have compiled a list of ten famous museums world, located in different countries ah, which is on everyone's lips. But there are museums in the world that few people know about, but which it would be worth knowing about, because they are very unusual. The video below shows some of them.

I hope the information presented in the article will help you in the development of your research projects.

Good luck with your studies!

Evgenia Klimkovich.

Louvre Paris

Probably no secret that the most famous museum in the world is the Louvre. This museum contains collections oldest works arts, thanks to which you can learn a lot of interesting things from the life of medieval peoples, as well as many existing civilizations and eras. The museum has more than 300 thousand exhibits, and only 10% of all the treasures of the museum are shown to tourists daily. This is where everyone is famous picture Leonardo da Vinci - Mona Lisa. The museum building itself is unique. architectural structure XVIII century. Also, this museum is considered the most visited in the world, every year it is visited by about 10 million people. The cost of a ticket to the Louvre is 10 euros.

British Museum London

The museum was created on the basis of private collections of three famous figures Britain in the 18th century. All exhibits are located in several thematic halls. Among them is the hall of Ancient Egypt, Ancient Greece, the Hall of Prehistoric Antiquities of Britain, the Hall of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, as well as the Hall of Oriental Monuments of Art and Architecture. In total, the museum has about seven million exhibits. Here you can find a lot of unique exhibits, including the popular in ancient egypt "book of the dead"and numerous sculptures of the heroes of Ancient Greece. A pleasant feature of the museum is that the entrance to it is completely free, and it works seven days a week. They visit this museum about 6 million people every year.

Vatican Museum Rome

The Vatican Museum is a complex of museums of various directions and times. It includes the Etruscan Museum, the Egyptian and Ethnological Missionary Museum, the Vatican Library, Historical Museum, as well as the world-famous Sistine Chapel, the Museum of Modern Art and the Pius IX Christian Museum. Each of these museums contains a huge number of unique exhibits relating to different eras and stages of human development, including sarcophagi and tombs of great personalities. About 5 million people visit this museum every year, and if you decide to visit this museum, it is best to book a ticket via the Internet, as huge queues gather near the museum ticket office every day.

National Science Museum Japan

This museum is the most popular in Asia. Here you can admire a huge number of exhibits, among which there are even the remains of ancient creatures. In addition, there is a botanical garden with a wide variety of plants from all over the world. The museum has many exhibits representing the development of technology from the earliest times to the present. In one of the halls you can get acquainted with the device solar system and conduct experiments in the field of physical phenomena.

Metropolitan Museum of Art New York

In fifth place in the ranking of the most famous museums world to be the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Surely many have heard of the so-called Museum Mile. In this place are collected best museums USA. Among them, the largest and most famous is the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It houses an incredible number of exhibits, ranging from Paleolithic artifacts to pop art items. Also here you can see ancient exhibits from Africa, the Middle East, Egypt and many other parts of our world. However, most of the attention here is given to American art.

State Hermitage Saint Petersburg

The Hermitage is one of the largest art museums in the world. A large number of exhibits are collected here, which are private collections of the richest families in Russia, including the Romanovs. In this museum, you can trace the entire course of the history of Russia, for the entire time of the reign of the Romanov dynasty. There are also works by famous European artists of the XVIII and XIX centuries.

Prado Museum Madrid

The museum is based on collections of paintings by the most famous kings of Spain. Initially, the paintings were intended to decorate church and palace chapels, but in early XIX century, the museum decided to open for people. Here you can find one of the most famous paintings depicting "John the Evangelist", painted by Don Cesaro Cabanes. At present, the main part of the paintings is taken from the monasteries and Escorial.

Guggenheim Museum Bilbao

The museum is not only a collection of exhibits of contemporary art in Spain, it also hosts exhibitions of famous foreign artists. The building of the museum, made in the style of deconstructivism, is in itself a unique landmark of the whole world. The shape of the museum resembles an alien ship from distant galaxies, near which there is a huge metal sculpture of a spider.

State Tretyakov Gallery Moscow

The gallery contains collections of paintings belonging to a variety of trends and eras, including numerous icons. The Tretyakov Gallery is one of the educational centers of the country. The basis for the creation of the gallery was the acquisition by the merchant Tretyakov in 1856 of a number of paintings famous artists. Every year, his collections were replenished with a number of paintings, from which the gallery was subsequently created.

Rijksmuseum Amsterdam

The Rijksmuseum closes the list of the most famous museums in the world. Despite the unattractive building of the museum, the collections of paintings make it possible to attribute it to one of the largest art museums in the world. Here you can find the work of the most famous painters Holland. Thanks to numerous sculptures, paintings, jewelry and household items local residents, you can get a fairly complete picture of the life of the people of the Netherlands since the 15th century. There is no other museum in the world where such a huge collection of exhibits would be collected, telling about the life of the country.

Each of the listed museums is unique in its own way, has its own history, purpose and deserves to be the first in the list of popular museums in the world.

Window in the Louvre Video

Every year on 18 May, the world celebrates International Museum Day. It appeared in 1977, when a proposal was adopted at a regular meeting of the International Council of Museums Russian organization on the establishment of this cultural holiday. Since 1978, International Museum Day has been celebrated in more than 150 countries. Today we offer you to get acquainted with the 10 best museums in the world.

Louvre. Paris

This is one of the largest art museums in the world. Once the Louvre was an ancient castle of the French kings, built by Philip Augustus in 1190. As a museum, it was first opened to visitors on November 8, 1793. The Louvre occupies a space of approximately 195 thousand square meters, has a total exposition area of ​​60,600 square meters .m Today the museum's catalog contains 400,000 exhibits. For convenience, the exhibition is divided into seven large parts: the departments of applied art, painting, sculpture and graphics, the ancient Egyptian department, the department of the Ancient East and Islamic art, as well as the department of art of Greece, Rome and the Etruscan empire. In general, not even a week is enough to get around everything. Therefore, if you are an ordinary average tourist who has allocated only one day to visit the Louvre, then visit only its main masterpieces, to which special signs lead. Or purposefully come to the painting department - the most impressive - and look at the works of Rubens, Rembrandt, Titian, Caravaggio, Dürer, Goya, Vermeer and many others.

Museum of the Vatican. Rome

The Vatican Museum is the most big museum world: 1,400 halls, 50,000 objects, and to get around all the exhibits presented, you need to walk 7 km. Of course, all visitors first of all seek to get into the Sistine Chapel. However, the structure of the museum is very peculiar: you can get to the very far point- The Vatican Pinakothek - only passing all the previous ones. So you need to calculate the forces. Should start with Egyptian Museum, which is enough to pass diagonally. and then run to the famous Belvedere, then to the Stanzas of Raphael. And, finally, to the Sistine Chapel, rightfully called the main local shrine.

British museum. London

The British Museum was founded on June 7, 1753 at the initiative of the government and on January 15, 1759 was officially opened to visitors. Thousands of people took part in its creation and development. The British Museum is also known as the Museum of Stolen Masterpieces or the Museum of All Civilizations. These names are justified. After all, the treasures presented in the museum were not obtained in the most honest way. For example, the Rosetta Stone, thanks to which scientists deciphered ancient hieroglyphs, as well as many ancient Egyptian monuments, was taken in Egypt from Napoleon's army. Similar story happened with the precious sculptural friezes of the Parthenon: the Englishman Lord Elgin took them out of Greece, having obtained written permission from the Turkish government. In the same way, the collection of the museum was replenished with sculptures of the mausoleum in Halicarnassus, the temple of Artemis in Ephesus and many other works of art. True, the exhibition of paintings in the museum is small - for that there is a National Gallery in London.

National Science Museum of Japan. Tokyo

This museum was founded in 1871. Most of its exposition is made up of natural science exhibits: stuffed animals, dinosaur remains and their modern models, etc. However, this museum is not only the largest museum in Tokyo and Japan, but also one of the best in the world. The museum has a "forest" hall and its own botanical garden, allowing you to appreciate all the richness of the plant world of our planet. And huge toothy skeletons hovering under the ceiling and appearing from the blue twilight will not leave anyone indifferent. Of course, here you will also find traditional Japanese exhibits, because the inhabitants of the country rising sun very proud of their culture.

Metropolitan Museum. NY

You have probably heard of the Museum Mile, which is located in New York between Fifth Avenue and 57th Street. It is here that the best museums in the United States are collected, the largest of which is the Metropolitan Museum of Art. In this museum you can find almost everything: from Paleolithic artifacts to pop art objects. There are also collections of art from Africa and Oceania, the Middle East and Egypt, which can safely be called a rarity. Here you will find a special hall that has collected clothes worn by the inhabitants of all five continents for seven centuries. There is also an exposition of art and architecture of medieval Europe, painting of the XII - XIX centuries, as well as musical instruments different countries. However, the main place here is still given to American art.

Prado Museum. Madrid

Madrid can safely boast of having one of the largest museums in Europe. visual arts. It was founded in 1819. However, the building continued to be completed until 1830. If we recall the history of Spain, for several centuries art in the country developed under the patronage of the church and the elite. This explains the appearance of most of the museum's exposition, which was collected by the royal family and the church. Here you will find paintings widely famous Raphael and the brilliant Hieronymus Bosch. The latter was very fond of Philip II: the artist's peculiar fantasy was able to fascinate the monarch so much that he even placed several paintings on the walls in his own bedroom.

Guggenheim Museum. Bilbao

This museum is located in the city of Bilbao, in northern Spain. It is just one of the branches of the Solomon Guggenheim Museum of Modern Art, located in the United States and the most striking of them, because it is recognized as the most outstanding architectural project in the world. There are thematic halls in the museum: the hall of surrealism, in which Dali, Magritte, Delvaux and Tanguy are represented, the hall of cubism, topped with masterpieces by Picasso, Léger and Chagall, the hall of futurism and abstractionism - Braque, Kandinsky. Its collection also includes works by Andy Warhol, Fernand Leger, Kandinsky and others. And here you can also see the collection of one of the most significant and extravagant collectors of avant-garde art - Peggy Guggenheim.

State Hermitage. Saint Petersburg

The State Hermitage is the largest art and cultural-historical museum not only in Russia, but throughout the world. It owes its origins private collection Russian empress Catherine II. When the collection was already large enough, the Hermitage was formed and opened to visitors in 1852, being at that time the Imperial Museum. However, the founding date of the museum is considered to be 1764, because it was then that the Empress acquired a large collection of Western European paintings. Today the museum has more than three million works of art and monuments of world culture. Its device is rather complicated. It is a complex complex: six majestic buildings, headed by the well-known winter palace, which are occupied by the main exposition of the museum, are located along the embankment of the Neva River.

State Tretyakov Gallery. Moscow

The State Tretyakov Gallery is one of the most significant collections of Russian fine art on a global scale. The Russians owe the presence of such a rich gallery to the merchant Pavel Tretyakov, because it is from his collection of works Russian art- the largest in the world - the history of the gallery began. The Tretyakov Gallery is famous for its exposition in the engineering building Russian Painting of the 11th - early 20th centuries, which is part of the All-Russian Museum Association of the State Tretyakov Gallery, formed already in 1986. It also includes: the Exhibition Hall in Tomachi, the House-Museum of P.D. Korina and V.M. Vasnetsov, A.M. Vasnetsov and the Museum-workshop of the sculptor A.S. Golubkina.

Rijksmuseum. Amsterdam

The Rijksmuseum is the main state museum in Holland. It is located in a huge old neo-Gothic palace with Burgundian towers and sculptural reliefs, which was built back in 1885. Its main exposition is dedicated to the great Dutch artists XV-XVII centuries Among them you will meet such world names as Rembrandt, Vermeer and de Hooch. The size of the museum is impressive and it is also impossible to get around it in one day, because the Rijksmuseum has 200 rooms. However, the main exhibitions can be quickly viewed, starting with the main exhibit - the famous work of art by Rembrandt's hands Night Watch. Allotted to him place of honor in the Hall of Fame. And at the end of the museum marathon, you can go to the Museumplein - a huge lawn square with a wonderful view of the Museum Quarter.