The Louvre Museum opens its collections

Last updated on 12 May 2026

You miss art and culture. If you can't get there, head to an amazing virtual space put online by the big national museum: The collections of the Louvre.

500,000 Museum works available on the net. The figure seems huge. He is. In its exceptional collections you will find all the works visible in the galleries of the museum. But not only, the site also offers access to many works that are in the museum archives and hitherto inaccessible to the public.

Direct access to all works

With the site of the Louvre collections, we are very far from the accesses aimed at certain audiences, such as the excellent Louvre of Children Presents Here Some time ago. In a more austere interface, the Louvre shows a very large part of its collections. Those that are exposed and those that are not.

In addition to works and objects belonging to national collections, inscribed on the inventories of the eight departments of the Louvre Museum (Eastern antiquities, Egyptian antiquities, Greek, Etruscan and Roman antiquities, Islamic arts, paintings, sculptures from the Middle Ages, Renaissance and Modern Times, graphic arts, art objects from the Middle Ages, Renaissance and Modern Times), the Museum also displays rarer pieces.

Collections In fact, it also presents the works called "MNR" (National Museums of Recovery). Coins that were recovered at the end of the Second World War, deposited by the Office des Propriétés Privés at the Louvre Museum, awaiting their return to their rightful owners.

Finally the base Collections of the Louvre makes available works entrusted to the museum for deposit by other French or foreign institutions.

In total, hundreds of thousands of works notices are freely searchable. The vast majority is illustrated with photos in a beautiful definition to zoom in to appreciate the details of each room.

How to find a work of art in the Louvre collections?

The Louvre Collections website is aimed at a very wide audience. Researchers, art lovers but also the general public or students. Everyone will find tools and entrances adapted to excavate or walk in these formidable collections.

Collections can be explored by type of work. Paintings, drawings, furniture, sculptures …s simple entry points that can then be fine-tuned with a range of filters.

The Louvre also offers a series of thematic albums to get to the point through selections made by the museum’s teams. You can click on the must-see ‘Les masterpieces du Louvre’, which presents 40 pieces in detail.

The site also offers an interesting interactive map of the museum, showing the exhibits from a map of the museum’s various galleries. We are still far from the incredible virtual tours offered by some museums but the idea is of course still interesting.

A search engine for pros of all works in the Louvre collections

The collections of the Louvre finally, offer a powerful search engine that indexes all records of works of art in the collections. An efficient full-text search engine with a very comprehensive advanced search form.

Search results can be exported in a format (CSV). The texts of works notices can also be retrieved in a JSON structured format.

An excellent online resource that the museum management has promised to update very regularly. Good news for all art lovers.