Louvre online: 500,000 works at your fingertips

The collection of the world’s most visited Parisian museum can now be viewed for free on the web.

The Louvre Museum in Paris, one of the world’s most important institutions with nearly 10 million visitors annually, is digitizing its collection and making it accessible to all.

Forced to close like many other cultural institutions, the Parisian museum has been working to repair the economic damage inflicted by the pandemic. 

In fact, the numbers speak for themselves: the great institution remained closed for 6 months in 2020 and lost 90 million euros, corresponding to 72% of visitors. 

To address this situation, management decided to diversify its revenue sources and strengthen its online presence.

In addition to having signed a series of commercial agreements, such as the one with Japanese giant Uniqlo that now offers the “Art and Logic'” T-shirt collection related to great masterpieces such as the Mona Lisa, the museum has completed the creation of a digital portal, collections.louvre.fr, capable of “serving the general public, such as the research audience,” explained Jean-Luc Martinez, director of the Louvre.

The new platform includes more than 482,000 works – including both exhibited and unpublished works – or three-quarters of the collection, and is offered as a replacement for the previous Atlas database, which included only works from the permanent collection. 

“The Louvre brings its treasures out of confinement, even the lesser-known ones,” reports director Martinez, “for the first time, everyone will be able, free of charge, from their computers or cell phones, to access the works kept in the museum, both those on display in the building and those on loan or in storage.“

In fact, the digital platform includes the Delacroix museum, sculptures from the Tuileries and Carrousel public gardens, and works from the Musées Nationaux Récupération program, a collection of some 1,800 artworks by great artists such as Chardin, Delacroix and Corot, recovered in Germany since World War II, temporarily entrusted to the custody of the Louvre pending eventual return to their rightful owners.

The Louvre’s portal not only features a well-organized search and thematic albums, but also brings together the recent 2020 acquisitions, where the presence of high-definition images, fact sheets and bibliographies offer the user the opportunity to delve into 

More and more cultural institutions are becoming familiar with the tools that technology offers, such as digitizing their collections.

For this reason it becomes fundamental to build a complete and updated Digital Archive, where it is possible to catalogue the works together with their documentation in full security, for an ordinary and professional management.

Among the most advanced tools we find Art Rights, the platform that includes all the most important services to support Artists, Collectors and Operators of the sector for the management and certification of works of art with Blockchain technology and Artificial Intelligence, allowing you to build your own Digital Archive in complete privacy.

And you, are you ready to discover the Louvre Museum’s art collection?

THE WOMEN OF THE WORKS OF ART

“Le Muse Nascoste” by Lauretta Colonnelli tells sixteen stories of women who changed the history of Art.

In a society where gender discrimination is a real problem, the art world is no exception either.

Although initiatives dedicated to women artists are increasing, think of FAC, The Feminist Art Coalition, in which more than 70 institutions have joined together to promote gender equality in art, the disparity does not seem to decrease either on the price of works (between 16-30% less) or on the presence of women artists in museums and represented by galleries.

According to data presented in The Art Market 2020 – An Art Basel and UBS Report, women artists represent 44% of the artists exhibited in galleries, while in the secondary market, only 6% of total sales come from works by women artists and the percentage of works over $10 million is around 5%.

The struggle of women in defense of their rights in the art world has ancient origins and is not limited to market issues but also concerns the history of works of art, the same ones that have made artists of all times among the most quoted, appreciated and famous in the history of art.

Think of works such as Botticelli’s Venus, Lippi’s Madonna and Child, Hopper’s mythical woman in the bar….

Those women’s faces are now carved in our daily imagination but the only name we know is that of the painter who immortalized them on his canvas.

Who are the women who made the fortunes of artists like Hopper, Cézanne, and Millais?

Journalist Lauretta Colonnelli has given an answer to this question in her book Le Muse nascoste (The Hidden Muses), which deals with the forgotten protagonists of great works of art, telling the stories of the female characters hidden in the canvases of famous paintings.

An anthology of sixteen lives of women who have been wives or daughters like Marguerite Matisse, daughter of the master of Fauvisme, or lovers, models or women of power.

There is also no shortage of artists themselves such as Josephine Verstille Nivison, a promising painter as well as the wife and model of Edward Hopper. Or Kandinskji’s fiancée, Gabriele Münter, also a talented painter.

Others are mysterious, though very famous, female figures, such as Mantegna’s Nana, or Jusepe de Ribera’s bearded woman.

Today, thanks to Lauretta Colonnelli’s book, these women have found their names again and have finally been embodied in historically existent characters. 

As the author herself argues, “For centuries they had remained unknown, lost in the endless multitude of anonymous people that Michel Foucault labeled hommes infâmes, not because they were without morals, but because they lacked fame, voice, and a narrative of themselves.”

And you, do you know the mystery women in the artwork?