49 Fun Facts About Museum

The word 'museum' comes from a Greek term for a temple dedicated to whom?

The Muses, the nine goddesses of the arts and sciences, gave their name to the mouseion; the most famous was the Mouseion of Alexandria, founded under the early Ptolemies in the third century BC.

One of the oldest known museums was built around 530 BC by Princess Ennigaldi in which modern country?

Ennigaldi's museum stood in Ur, in what is now southern Iraq; Leonard Woolley's excavators found its labelled Mesopotamian antiquities, dating to the last years of the Neo-Babylonian Empire.

Which Oxford institution, opened in 1683, is Britain's first public museum?

The Ashmolean opened in 1683 to house Elias Ashmole's cabinet of curiosities, itself largely gathered by the gardener-collectors John Tradescant, father and son.

The British Museum, established in 1753, was founded on the collections of which physician?

Sir Hans Sloane's 71,000 objects, bequeathed to the nation in 1753, formed the founding collection; the museum opened in Montagu House in 1759 as a free, public national museum.

Which British Museum object did British forces take from the French in Egypt in 1801?

The Rosetta Stone, seized under the 1801 Capitulation of Alexandria, carries a 196 BC decree in hieroglyphic, Demotic and Greek and has been on display since 1802.

The Louvre opened as a museum in 1793 with an exhibition of how many paintings?

The Louvre opened on 10 August 1793 showing 537 paintings and 184 other objects, most of them former royal property or works confiscated from the church during the Revolution.

Which architect designed the glass pyramid that became the Louvre's main entrance?

I. M. Pei was chosen personally by President Mitterrand in 1983, and his glass pyramid opened in 1989; the Inverted Pyramid in the underground Carrousel du Louvre followed in 1993.

Who stole the Mona Lisa from the Louvre in 1911?

Vincenzo Peruggia, an Italian handyman who had worked at the Louvre, hid it under his smock in August 1911 and claimed patriotism when caught in Florence in 1913.

Which French king acquired the Mona Lisa after Leonardo's death in 1519?

Francis I, who had brought Leonardo to Amboise in 1516, bought the painting after the artist's death for 4,000 gold écus and kept it at Fontainebleau.

The Louvre Palace was originally built in the late 12th century as what?

Philip II built the Louvre as a fortress around 1190 to guard Paris; Charles V turned it into a residence in the 1360s, and its medieval foundations are visible in the museum's basement.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art's main building sits on which New York thoroughfare?

Its address on the "Museum Mile" is 1000 Fifth Avenue; The Cloisters, its medieval branch, is uptown in Fort Tryon Park.

What is the popular centerpiece of the Metropolitan Museum's Egyptian Art department?

The Temple of Dendur, a Roman-era Egyptian temple given by Egypt in 1965 after the Aswan dam rescue, was reassembled in the Met's glass-walled Sackler Wing in 1978.

Which British scientist left his fortune to the United States, giving the Smithsonian its name?

James Smithson, an English chemist who never visited America, left about $500,000 in gold to the United States in his will to found an institution 'for the increase and diffusion of knowledge'.

Which Smithsonian museum houses the Hope Diamond?

The Hope Diamond, a 45.52-carat blue diamond donated by Harry Winston in 1958, sits in the National Museum of Natural History's gem hall on the National Mall.

Florence's Uffizi takes its name from the Italian word for what?

Uffizi means 'offices': Vasari began the complex in 1560 to house the administrative offices of Cosimo I de' Medici's government, and the galleries opened to visitors by the 1760s.

The Prado's most extensively represented artist is which Spanish painter?

Francisco Goya is the Prado's most extensively represented artist, with some 150 paintings plus hundreds of drawings and prints; the Madrid museum opened in November 1819 showing only Spanish painting.

Which empress founded the Hermitage Museum in 1764?

Catherine the Great began the Hermitage in 1764 by buying 225 paintings from the Berlin merchant Johann Ernst Gotzkowsky, a collection originally assembled for Frederick the Great of Prussia.

The Hermitage's main complex includes which former imperial residence?

The Winter Palace, the tsars' official residence from the 1760s until 1917, is the heart of the Hermitage complex; its baroque facade by Rastrelli faces Palace Square.

Which architect designed the Rijksmuseum's main building, opened in Amsterdam in 1885?

Pierre Cuypers, who also designed Amsterdam's Centraal Station, gave the 1885 Rijksmuseum its Gothic-Renaissance brick facade; the galleries show about 8,000 objects from a collection of a million.

Where in Midtown does New York's Museum of Modern Art stand?

MoMA has stood at 11 West 53rd Street in Midtown since its purpose-built Goodwin and Stone building opened there in 1939; the sculpture garden followed in 1953.

Which architect designed New York's spiral Guggenheim Museum, completed in 1959?

Frank Lloyd Wright received the commission in 1943 and the spiral opened in October 1959, six months after his death; artists protested that its sloping ramp would distort the hanging of paintings.

The Vatican Museums trace their origin to which ancient sculpture, unearthed in a Roman vineyard in 1506?

Laocoön and His Sons was dug up on the Esquiline on 14 January 1506; Pope Julius II sent Michelangelo to inspect it and bought it for the Belvedere courtyard, founding the collection.

Which room is deliberately the last one on the visitor route through the Vatican Museums?

The Sistine Chapel is placed at the end of the route so visitors finish under Michelangelo's 1508–12 ceiling and his Last Judgment on the altar wall, completed in 1541.

The Musée d'Orsay in Paris occupies a former what?

The Beaux-Arts Gare d'Orsay railway station was built for the 1900 Exposition Universelle; after its platforms proved too short, it closed to main-line trains in 1939 and reopened as a museum in 1986.

London's Tate Modern is housed in a converted what?

Bankside Power Station was designed by Giles Gilbert Scott, who also did Battersea Power Station; the Turbine Hall is its centrepiece.

Which architect designed London's Natural History Museum building, opened in 1881?

Alfred Waterhouse clad the 1881 building in Romanesque terracotta, with carved animals on the facade; it houses some 80 million specimens across botany, entomology, mineralogy, palaeontology and zoology.

New York's natural history museum on Central Park West stands in a park named after which president?

Theodore Roosevelt Park surrounds the museum; the president's father, Theodore Roosevelt Sr., was among its founders in 1869, and an equestrian statue of the president stood at the Central Park West entrance until 2022.

How many works were stolen from Boston's Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in 1990?

13 works, among them a Vermeer, three Rembrandts and a Manet, were taken in 81 minutes by two thieves dressed as police on 18 March 1990; the museum left the empty frames hanging.

Which Vermeer was taken in the 1990 Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum heist?

Vermeer's The Concert, one of only around three dozen surviving works by him, has been valued at over $200 million; Rembrandt's only seascape, The Storm on the Sea of Galilee, vanished the same night.

Sue, the famous T. rex at Chicago's Field Museum, sold at auction in 1997 for roughly how much?

Sue fetched $8.36 million — roughly $8.3 million — at Sotheby's in October 1997, then a record for a fossil; the skeleton had been dug up in South Dakota in 1990.

Which architect designed the Louvre Abu Dhabi and its vast perforated dome?

Jean Nouvel's design covers the galleries with a 180-metre perforated dome whose layered lattice casts a 'rain of light'; the museum was inaugurated on 8 November 2017 by Emmanuel Macron.

The Museum of Bad Art, whose motto is "art too bad to be ignored", is in which US state?

The Museum of Bad Art has always been in Massachusetts: it began in 1993 when antique dealer Scott Wilson rescued a painting from the trash, and long occupied a theatre basement in Dedham.

In Night at the Museum, where does Ben Stiller's Larry Daley take a night-watchman job?

Larry Daley takes the night shift guarding New York's natural history collection at the American Museum of Natural History; the 2006 film is based on Milan Trenc's 1993 book, and Robin Williams plays a waxwork president.

International Museum Day is held each year on or around which date?

International Museum Day falls on 18 May, with events held on or around that date; ICOM has coordinated it since 1977, each year under a different theme.

Frank Gehry's titanium-clad Guggenheim Museum opened in 1997 in which Spanish city?

King Juan Carlos I opened it on the banks of the Nervión on 18 October 1997; the urban regeneration it sparked gave rise to the term 'Bilbao effect'.

Which Van Gogh painting hangs at the Getty Center in Los Angeles?

Irises, painted at the Saint-Rémy asylum in 1889, was bought by the Getty in 1990 after its record $53.9 million 1987 sale; it hangs in Richard Meier's hilltop Getty Center, opened in December 1997.

The Acropolis Museum in Athens, opened in 2009, was designed by which architect?

Bernard Tschumi, working with Greek architect Michael Photiadis, designed the museum opened in June 2009; its top-floor Parthenon Gallery, aligned with the temple, was built to press Greece's case for the marbles' return.

When Berlin's Pergamon Museum closed in October 2023, how long was its renovation expected to take?

At the October 2023 closure, officials expected 14 to 20 years of work — the north wing to reopen in 2027 and the whole museum, home to the Pergamon Altar and Ishtar Gate, around 2037 or later.

The Grand Egyptian Museum stands beside which landmark?

The Grand Egyptian Museum sits about two kilometres from the Giza Pyramids on the plateau's edge, and its galleries display Tutankhamun's complete collection of more than 5,000 objects together for the first time.

The Museum of Broken Relationships was founded in which city?

Zagreb artists Olinka Vištica and Dražen Grubišić created it from the leftovers of their own breakup; after touring from 2006, it found a permanent home in Zagreb's Upper Town in 2010.

Which tsar opened the Kunstkamera, Russia's first public museum, in 1714?

Peter the Great founded the Kunstkamera in 1714 after seeing cabinets of curiosities on his 1697–98 Grand Embassy to western Europe; its anatomical specimens came largely from Dutch collector Frederik Ruysch.

The Louvre displays about how many works of art at any one time?

About 35,000 works are on display at any time, drawn from holdings of roughly 500,000 objects across eight curatorial departments, from Egyptian antiquities to paintings.

Which Paris museum occupies the Hôtel Biron, where its namesake artist rented a studio from 1908?

The Musée Rodin opened in 1919 in the Hôtel Biron, the 18th-century mansion where Rodin rented rooms from 1908; he donated his works to the state on condition the house became his museum.

Gerrit Rietveld and which Japanese architect designed the Van Gogh Museum's buildings?

Kisho Kurokawa designed the elliptical exhibition wing that opened in 1999, beside Gerrit Rietveld's 1973 main building; the museum holds the world's largest collection of Van Gogh's paintings and drawings.

Taipei's National Palace Museum was originally founded in Beijing in which year?

The Palace Museum opened in the Forbidden City on 10 October 1925, the year after the last emperor Puyi was expelled; its evacuated treasures were re-established in Taipei in 1965.

London's V&A is the world's largest museum of what?

The V&A calls itself the world's largest museum of applied and decorative arts and design, with a permanent collection of about 2.8 million objects, from ceramics and textiles to fashion and furniture.

The Egyptian Museum in Cairo occupies a 1901 building in which location?

The Egyptian Museum stands on the north side of Tahrir Square in a neoclassical building by Frenchman Marcel Dourgnon that opened in 1902; Auguste Mariette's collection reached it after earlier homes at Bulaq and Giza.

In which city was the Rijksmuseum founded in 1798, before moving to Amsterdam?

The Hague's Huis ten Bosch palace housed the original Nationale Kunst-Galerij from 1798; King Louis Bonaparte moved it to Amsterdam in 1808, where it sat in the Royal Palace and then the Trippenhuis.

Who reopened the Rijksmuseum in 2013 after its ten-year, €375 million renovation?

Queen Beatrix reopened the Rijksmuseum on 13 April 2013, seventeen days before abdicating in favour of Willem-Alexander; the renovated museum drew a record 2.47 million visitors in 2014.