# The Louvre Wins Twelfth Hall of Fame Contest!



## Wu-Gambino (Dec 13, 2002)

*Week 12: Best Museum*

*1. Louvre, Paris* - 50 votes (44.25%)

*2. Musei Vaticani, Rome* - 20 votes (17.70%)

*3. British Museum, London* - 18 votes (15.93%)

*4. Galleria Uffizi, Florence* - 17 votes (15.04%)

*5. Natural History Museum, London* - 8 votes (7.08%)


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## Monkey (Oct 1, 2002)

The Natural History Museum deserved far more votes!


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## Medo (Apr 7, 2004)

The British Museum also deserved more votes.


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## Matthieu (Mar 7, 2004)

The Louvre also deserved more vote


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## Metropolitan (Sep 21, 2004)

The Hermitage in Saint Petersbourg deserves more votes.

Mainly there are two huge museums in the world : the Louvre and the Hermitage. Those museums exhibit paintings from all times and countries, sculptures, archeological foundings, etc... Knowing the huge collections, it's objectively impossible to consider a museum which is specific to only one topic as more worthy than those.

Personally I consider that the Metropolitan Museum of Art is also missing from that list for about the same reason (even if it's smaller than the Hermitage or the Louvre).

Museums from London are great and even better, they are free. However it's tough for them to hold the comparison. Subjectively, my best remembrance for a museum in London is the Tate Modern near the Millenium Bridge. I've been really desappointed by the National Gallery and even more by the Tate "english only" gallery.

Other great museums in Europe which should be mentionned : the Rijksmuseum and the Van Gogh museum in Amsterdam (both are outstanding), the Pergamonmuseum in Berlin (the most interesting archeological museum I've visited, better than the Louvre or the British museum in that field), the Prado in Madrid with among other things Goya's collection (I love Goya), and of course the Guggenheim museum in Bilbao, which is an outstanding monument. There are of course tons of other things to see and my list is far to be exhaustive of course. For instance, the Belvedere in Vienna is really interesting with its collection from Klimt.

And it's also true that Paris can't be summarized to the Louvre : The Musée d'Orsay of course (my personnal favourite), the Musée de l'Orangerie (best exhibition of Monet I've seen), the Centre Pompidou (Modern Art), etc...

Bah anyway, my final point will be that there are more than one museum to visit in this world.


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## nick_taylor (Mar 7, 2003)

^^ Come on now the Hermitage is immense and the Louvre is no bigger than the British Museum (the British Museum is the largest museum in terms of exhibits: 6,000,000 and the Victoria & Albert is second with 4,000,000!!). I would have replaced the Galleria Uffizi with the Hermitage in the listing though.


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## Metropolitan (Sep 21, 2004)

nick-taylor said:


> ^^ Come on now the Hermitage is immense and the Louvre is no bigger than the British Museum (the British Museum is the largest museum in terms of exhibits: 6,000,000 and the Victoria & Albert is second with 4,000,000!!). I would have replaced the Galleria Uffizi with the Hermitage in the listing though.


Ok just a tip for next time : *Think before posting.*


This is the *British Museum* :











And This is *the Louvre* :











This is the *Main Inner Court* of the British Museum :











This is *one of the Six* Lateral Court of the Louvre :












Sorry to tell you this but the British is a dwarf compared to the Louvre.


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## Matthieu (Mar 7, 2004)

Don't tell me guys, after this, than London vs Paris isn't the biggest rivalry of this forum.


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## Metropolitan (Sep 21, 2004)

Exarchus said:


> Don't tell me guys, after this, than London vs Paris isn't the biggest rivalry of this forum.


Exarchus, this is certainly not my point. London is really a great city and many cities in the world would dream to have its museums. As I said, I like a lot the Tate Modern and the British is an especially well-made museum dedicated to Ancient Civilization, a museum which is moreover free. However, as well-made as it is, it remains a dwarf in term of size compared to the Louvre. Bigger doesn't always mean better you know. The Louvre needs weeks to be fully visited. A visit at the Louvre can be really exhausting, and in the end you don't even appreciate the collection which is exhibited because you have no more legs.

There are globally 3 really huge museums : The Louvre in Paris, the Hermitage in Saint Petersbourg and the Metropolitan Museum in New York. Those three are huge generalist museums exhibiting any kind of Arts. There's no such a museum in London but that doesn't mean it's bad because of this. Actually, when you want to see Egyptian Art, you don't have to go in a museum exhibiting also Paintings from all times and countries, Renaissance scultpures, Oriental Arts, or the Medieval foundations of a former castle built at that place before.

Once again, I tell it to you : Bigger doesn't necessarily mean better, especially when we talk about museums.


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## nick_taylor (Mar 7, 2003)

Come on now - the Cour Carrée is a more representative comparison between the Great Court, but even then the Great Court is larger. You must know that in the centre of the Great Court is the immense Reading Room, which your photo forgets to show. I've been to the Musée du Louvre and I know damn well that the Sully is probably a bit smaller than the western wing of the British Museum.

Are you also telling me that you could sample 6,000,000 objects in less time than you could study those in the Musée du Louvre? I agree that London has diversity of museums - but that is because it has to spread it over several areas (ie the Musée du Louvre in London would be a super-museum of the British Museum and National Gallery combined). The British Museum is by no means dwarfed by the Musée du Louvre, for that would entail a hugely arrogant and short-sighted view. Infact both museums have (I believe) roughly the same amount of galleries and exhibition rooms. I thus come to the theory, that your actually getting confused between the spaghetti "sprawl" look of the Musée du Louvre and the condensed version of the British Museum (The western end of the British Museum for example is 5-6 galleries thick).

I don't believe that there is a big three as you claim (Met, Louvre, Hermitage). But just the big two: Musée du Louvre + British Museum. The Hermitage and Met are excellent museums....but their collections are by far not the most absorbing or influential upon the visitor. I thus believe that you missed out the British Museum intentionally to try and create a flared argument. Then again while the Musée du Louvre and others are mixed artifact and painting galleries, the British Museum is predominantly artifact orientated (I believe 1 gallery is dedicated to actual paintings).

Now the Musée du Louvre is class, it is far more uniform and nice looking (apart from the Great Court and Reading Room which outdoes any court or single room in the Musée du Louvre) than the British Museum, but you shouldn't over exagerate it.


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## bnmaddict (Jan 6, 2005)

Nick, have a look on this page:

http://www.burohappold.com/newslinks/pressoffice/FireEngBM.php 

You'll learn that the total public floor area of the British Museum is 35000m2 (after Foster's refurbishment)

Now look at this page:

http://www.insecula.com/musee/M0001.html 

It's in french, but you can easily understand that the total public floor area of the Louvre is 60620m2.

-> The louvre is just two times bigger than the British Museum. And there's MANY other great museum in Paris (Orsay, Pompidou, Picasso, Carnavalet, Rodin, Guimet, three big museums of technology, Le jardin de plantes which is the Natural history... and dozens of other museum...).


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## italiano_pellicano (Feb 22, 2010)

Amazing Museums


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## erdnisloed (Aug 17, 2007)

nick_taylor said:


> ^^ Come on now the Hermitage is immense and the Louvre is no bigger than the British Museum (the British Museum is the largest museum in terms of exhibits: 6,000,000 and the Victoria & Albert is second with 4,000,000!!). I would have replaced the Galleria Uffizi with the Hermitage in the listing though.


How many silver little spoons in the V&A ? 

Each side of the 16-17th century Cour carrée is 122,50 m long, so its surface is 15.006 m². What is the surface of the Great Court of the British museum ?

Personnally, I consider that the Great Court is technically more elaborated than the addition of the 2 main smaller covered Cours Marly and Puget of the Louvre, which were covered in a more simple but as elegant way by the Irish ingeneer Peter Rice, who lived and constructed mostly in France : he invented at La Villette the large free standing glass facades system held by an iron cross at each glass sheet angle, now used worldwide.

I precise that contrary to the British museum and Ermitage the national collection of French archeology is split between the National Museum of Prehistory in Les-Eyzies-de-Tayac, Périgord (before Antiquity : 6.000.000 items) and the National Museum of Archeology in Saint-Germain-en-Laye (until the Carolingians : 3.000.000 tems) reason why the Louvre holds only 554.600 items without national antiquities (554.498 on October 4, 2014) of wich 35000 are displayed on 60620 m² of the 73000 m² of the palace (without the unfortunately destroyed Tuileries !) including 12660... ancient paintings, nevertheless mostly in storage or ''dépôt'' in provincial museums, still less... than the Ermitage with about 16000 paintings, but which include modern paintings too (cubism), when the Louvre was deprived in 1986 of the 5346 paintings of the musée d'Orsay, so an original total of 18000 paintings superior to the Ermitage.
This can be compared with the only 2364 paintings of the National Gallery but of high quality and with virtually no lack (Fouquet and small Giotto and Cimabue) and to which should normally be added the Royal collection... or, contrary to the Louvre (Duccio, Giorgione, Verrocchio lacks), no insufficiencies (at the Louvre : Velasquez, Parmigianino, Brueghel the Elder, Canaletto, Moroni, Hals,...).
My prefered museum in London is the National Gallery. The greatest items of the BM are IMO the Parthenon marbles and the Ninive low-reliefs.
The specificity of London IMO is the number of ancient paintings galleries (11 collections... with pieces before 1900 and above all before 1800) with great international names (NG, NPortraitsG, Tate B, V&A, Wallace, Dulwich, Courtauld, Aspley house, Royal Academy, municipal collection and Royal collection) while in the only 9 equivalent collections in Paris the items are more strictly grouped (''en masse'' for the 2 largest) by periods and owner (nation or city) or by continental provenance (Guimet, Branly), with a smaller taste in gold and silverware displays  (Louvre, Orsay, Jacquemart-André, Orangerie), not forgetting Versailles (the 9th), so leaving less pieces of interest/ancient paintings for the ''smaller'' municipal museums, where the French school prevails (Petit Palais, Carnavalet, Cognacq-Jay + 1 national : Arts Déco) and there is no permanent gallery for the important Beaux-Arts school collection (the 10th in fact). If Chantilly was added that would make 11 collections like in London. But on the other hand Paris has the particularity to have several artist's houses/collections (Picasso, Rodin, Marmottan-Monet, Bourdelle, Gustave Moreau, Henner, Zadkine) compared with few in London (Soane).
For modern art the offer is rather similar, but IMO more encyclopedic and larger this time in Paris : there are ''small'' collections in both cities (Saatchi, Estorick in London / Vuitton, Pinault collections (in 2021) in Paris) and large collections too (Tate M in London (3245 paintings) / MNAM (national with 6054 paintings) and MAMVP (municipal with 1965 paintings) museums of Modern art in Paris).
It's interesting to note too that the 15 main collections of paintings in London hold quasi the same number of paintings (about 23000) than the 15 main parisian ones.

The collections of the natural history museum in Paris (or New-York, unparalleled for dinosaures) is IMO equivalent in interest to the one of London and they both hold about 65 milllions items. Both cities have as well an army, a mankind and a sciences museum {Sciences museum / Arts et Métiers). But in Paris the modern experiments are not gathered in the same convenient place like in London, but in 2 additional places (Palais de la découverte and La Villette), while the national medical collection was scattered in Paris in 3... small museums of the school of medecine, with few attendance, and consequently closed one after the other then stored..., like the municipal medical museum !


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## Matthieu (Mar 7, 2004)

Now that's what I call a bump


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## erdnisloed (Aug 17, 2007)

Matthieu, I thought that it was Perpignan railways station not Tarbes ! 

PS : the medical collections in Paris are rather important but quasi invisible now : to the 4 already mentionned could be added those of the Val de Grace, Fragonard, Saint-Louis hospital and Moisan museums. But few people are interested in this matter or to gather them in the same place, which for example could have been the 3rd storey of the Mankind museum (research laboratories now).
End !


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