The Louvre Museum

The Louvre is one of the most impressive art collections in history. The magnificent, baroque-style palace and museum — Le Musée du Louvre in French — sits along the banks of the Seine River in Paris. It is one of the city’s biggest tourist attractions.

The Louvre or Louvre Museum is one of the world's largest museums and a historic monument. A central landmark of Paris, France, it is located on the Right Bank of the Seine in the 1st arrondissement (district). Nearly 35,000 objects from prehistory to the 21st century are exhibited over an area of 60,600 square metres (652,300 square feet). With more than 8 million visitors each year, the Louvre is the world's most visited museum.

The Louvre’s collection includes Egyptian antiques, ancient Greek and Roman sculptures, paintings by the Old Masters, and crown jewels and other artifacts from French nobles. Its works span the sixth century B.C. to the 19th century A.D. 

The Louvre is involved in controversies that surround cultural property seized under Napoleon I, as well as during World War II by the Nazis. After Nazi occupation, 61,233 articles of more than 150,000 seized artworks returned to France and were assigned to the Office des Biens Privés. In 1949, it entrusted 2130 remaining unclaimed pieces (including 1001 paintings) to the Direction des Musées de France in order to keep them under appropriate conditions of conservation until their restitution and meanwhile classified them as MNRs (Musees Nationaux Recuperation or, in English, the National Museums of Recovered Artwork). Some 10% to 35% of the pieces are believed to come from Jewish spoliations and until the identification of their rightful owners, which declined at the end of the 1960s, they are registered indefinitely on separate inventories from the museum's collections.