Louvre Makes Its Entire Collection Available Online

THE Louvre Museum has made its entire collection available to view online.

The Louvre Museum, Paris, has said it has made nearly half a million items from its collection available online for the public to visit free of charge.

As part of a huge revamp of its online presence, the world’s most-visited museum has created a new database of 482,000 items and over three-quarters of them have already been labelled with pictures and information.

The revamp comes after a year of shutdowns related to the coronavirus pandemic that has caused a huge surge in visits to its main website, louvre.fr, which has also been given a makeover.

President-director Jean-Luc Martinez said: “It’s a step that has been in preparation for several years with the aim of serving the general public as well as researchers. Accessibility is at the heart of our mission.”

The database not only comprises of items on public display in the museum but also includes those in storage, which includes its new state of the art facility at Lievin, Northern France.

The platform includes the Delacroix museum, which is run by the Louvre, and also sculptures from Tuileries gardens. It also includes works from Germany, that have been recovered since the end of the war in 1945, that are due to be restored to the families from which they were stolen.

Earlier this month, the museum announced that it would step-up efforts to restore items looted by the Nazi regime from Jewish families.

It is working to verify all 13,943 items between 1933 and 1945 and hopes to complete the process within five years.

Martinez said that approximately one per cent of portraits in the collections were looted.

“The Louvre has nothing to hide, and the reputational risk is enormous,” he said. “When the next generations want to know where these collections came from, how do we react? By doing the historical work and establishing the facts.”

You can view the collections online here: collections.louvre.fr

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