Jan Bartek – AncientPages.com –  This is really great news to anyone who appreciates art and culture. The Louvre Museum has announced it has put its entire collection online for free! The collection contains nearly half a million items you can study and admire online. Among the most famous items, you will find the “Mona Lisa” and “Venus de Milo,” just to mention a few.

Credit: Louvre Museum

Like most museums worldwide, the Louvre Museum in Paris, France has been closed due to the Coronavirus pandemic, but its website has been overwhelmed with visitors. Perhaps in troubling times like these our need to admire and enjoy beautiful art grows.

To boost its online presence and giving anyone an opportunity to see the marvelous objects, the museum has created a new database of 482,000 items at collections.louvre.fr with more than three-quarters already labeled with information and pictures.

“The Louvre’s collections site offers several research tools: full-text search engine; advanced search form; features that filter search results according to date of creation, collection the work belongs to, where the work is located, category of work, artist/maker; themed albums; and an interactive map to find works on display in the museum.

The site allows users to download texts about the artwork in JSON format,” the museum announced.

“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,” said president-director Jean-Luc Martinez.

Online visitors can now see paintings, sculptures, textiles, writings, inscriptions, jewelry and much more.

“The platform also includes the Delacroix museum, which is run by the Louvre, as well as sculptures from the neighboring Tuileries gardens and works recovered from Germany since the end of the war in 1945 that are waiting to be restored to the families from which they were looted.

The museum announced earlier this month that it would intensify its efforts to restore items looted from Jewish families by the Nazi regime,” the AFP reports.

The Great Sphinx of Tanis. Credit: Louvre Museum

The Louvre Museum is currently working to complete the verification of all 13,943 items acquired between 1933 and 1945, The goal is to complete the process within five years.

Martinez estimated that around one percent 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 see the collection here – collections.louvre.fr

Written by Jan Bartek – AncientPages.com Staff Writer