If you haven’t heard, the Louvre website has posted the Louvre Museum collection online and they have online tours! Yes-you can visit the Louvre online. The Louvre has posted almost every work of art it owns–over 500,000 works. So now you can visit the Louvre online from anywhere. Obviously, there is no comparison to visiting in person, but until you can manage that, we recommend you visit the Louvre museum online.
The Louvre Online Tours
Because there is so much available, they created Louvre online tours. These digital, interactive experiences are definitely worth the time. In these tours you can navigate a curated exhibit within the Louvre. Best of all, they are free.
In each of these tours, you move throughout the space at your own leisure. You can approach works of art and various artifacts. Then, with a simple click of an icon, you see a blown up version of the art with all the information that you could want. These tours each follow a cohesive theme, which were carefully put together by the Louvre.
A Great Louvre Online Tour: Founding Myths
An excellent Louvre online tour is Founding Myths: From Hercules to Darth Vader which looks at the representation of myths. Also, it examines how artists, filmmakers, and musicians envisioned myths and gave them form. This is an extremely interesting look at the cultural development of how we portray and redevelop myths to suit our current cultural needs.
In addition to having a slew of interesting exhibits, these tours are also peppered with information about the development of the exhibit and museum experience. This “Behind-the-Scenes” information shows us the process of creating an exhibit. Also, they share the rationale behind these decisions. This can be as interesting as the art itself.
By learning about this process, you can find yourself seeing an exhibit you visit as a bit of a work of art in and of itself.
These exhibits combine a careful selection of owned and borrowed pieces that form the content of the exhibit. But also the designers must consider flow of movement through a space, the graphic and print design, the lighting, and the writing.
As a result, your entire experience is dictated by these design elements, and these tours’ small explanations peppered throughout are an excellent way to begin to reflect on how the tours are developed in the first place.
If this post has peaked your interest to visit the Louvre museum online, please go see these tours for yourself, they are completely free and can be found in English HERE. You can navigate within the space of each tour or use the map in the upper left corner. We hope you have fun exploring.
More About the Louvre
Read our posts about the Louvre including:
Are You Sure You Want to See the Mona Lisa?
There’s More to Art in Paris than the Louvre
The Ten Best Things in the Louvre That Are Not the Mona Lisa
We hope you enjoy the Louvre online collection.
