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The new platform includes more than 482,000 works – including both exhibited and unpublished works – or three-quarters of the collection, and is offered as a replacement for the previous Atlas database, which included only works from the permanent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