Louvre Trivia
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46 free Louvre trivia questions with answers — geography quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Louvre trivia for art lovers, Paris visitors and anyone who has queued under the glass pyramid or fought the crowds in front of the Mona Lisa. This quiz starts with the building: Philip II's twelfth-century fortress, Francis I's Renaissance rebuild, Louis XIV's departure for Versailles, the Revolution's decision to open the royal collection to the public on 10 August 1793, and Napoleon's short-lived Musee Napoleon stuffed with plunder. Then it tours the collection and its stories: how the Mona Lisa came to France and how Vincenzo Peruggia walked out with it in 1911, the farmer who dug up the Venus de Milo, the headless Winged Victory on the Daru staircase, the Code of Hammurabi, the Seated Scribe, Veronese's enormous Wedding at Cana, Gericault's Raft, Delacroix's Liberty and David's Coronation. It finishes with the modern museum: Mitterrand's Grand Louvre, I. M. Pei's pyramid and its 666-pane myth, the eight departments, the Louvre-Lens and Louvre Abu Dhabi outposts, record visitor numbers and the October 2025 crown-jewel robbery. Questions range from easy to expert, and every answer was checked against a reference page and carries its source. If you enjoy this quiz, try our Paris, art history and famous paintings quizzes next.
30 of 46 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which part of central Paris is home to the Louvre?
The Right Bank
The Right Bank is the Louvre's home: the site lay on the western edge of medieval Paris, where a fortress beside the river could guard the city against attack from the west.
Q 02Which French king began the Louvre as a fortress in the late 12th century?
Philip II
Philip II, known as Philip Augustus, built the fortress around 1190 to guard the city against attack from Normandy, then held by the English kings; its foundations survive in the basement.
Q 03Which king began rebuilding the medieval Louvre as a Renaissance palace in 1546?
Francis I
Francis I hired the architect Pierre Lescot in 1546 to turn the old fortress into a Renaissance palace, but died the next year, leaving his son Henry II to see the new wing built.
Q 04The Grand Larousse traces the name Louvre to a word for what?
A wolf-hunting den
A wolf-hunting den is the Grand Larousse's reading, from Latin lupus, wolf; other scholars propose quite different roots, so the origin is still disputed.
Q 05Louis XIV abandoned the Louvre for which palace in 1682?
Versailles
Versailles became the seat of the court in 1682; the Louvre was left to the royal collections and, from 1692, to the academies, which held exhibitions there.
Q 06Which event turned the Louvre from a royal palace into a public museum?
The French Revolution
The French Revolution made the royal art collection national property, and the museum opened in 1793, a year to the day after the monarchy fell.
Q 07In 1803 the Louvre was renamed in honour of whom?
Napoleon
Napoleon, then First Consul, lent his name to the Musée Napoléon in 1803; its director Vivant Denon filled it with art seized across Europe, much of it returned after 1815.
Q 08Which Louvre wing, running along the rue de Rivoli, housed France's Ministry of Finance until 1989?
Richelieu wing
The Richelieu wing held the Ministry of Finance until it moved to Bercy in 1989; the Grand Louvre project then turned its offices into galleries, which opened in 1993.
Q 09Which duo filmed a 2018 music video inside the Louvre?
Beyoncé and Jay-Z
Beyoncé and Jay-Z shot their video in the galleries, posing before the Mona Lisa; the Louvre said interest in it helped draw a record 10.2 million visitors that year.
Q 10Which French president launched the Grand Louvre project in 1981?
Francois Mitterrand
Francois Mitterrand announced the Grand Louvre in September 1981, months after taking office; the project cleared the Finance Ministry out of the north wing and added the glass entrance by 1989.
Q 11The Louvre Pyramid's glass took two years of research to make it what?
Perfectly clear
Perfectly clear glass was the architect's demand, so that the old palace fronts could be admired through the pyramid; the Saint-Gobain works needed two years to develop it.
Q 12What occupied the Louvre's central courtyard before the glass pyramid was built there in the 1980s?
Gardens and a car park
Gardens and a car park: museum and ministry staff parked around two small 19th-century gardens until the Grand Louvre dig replaced them with the pyramid and the lobby beneath it.
Q 13Which architect designed the Louvre Pyramid?
I. M. Pei
Q 21Where was the Mona Lisa hidden when war threatened in 1938-39?
Chateau de Chambord
Chateau de Chambord took in the Mona Lisa as convoys emptied the Louvre in the last days of August 1939; it was later moved on to other hiding places and came home in 1945.
Q 22The Venus de Milo was discovered in 1820 by whom?
A Greek farmer
A Greek farmer uncovered the statue while digging on Milos in April 1820; a French sailor who was watching urged him to keep going, and France bought it before a rival buyer could carry it off.
Q 23Based on a marble hand found beside her, what was the Venus de Milo thought to be holding?
An apple
I. M. Pei was chosen personally by the French president in 1983, on the strength of the museum wings he had built in Boston and Washington; his glass pyramid opened in March 1989.
Q 14On what material is the Mona Lisa painted?
White poplar panel
White poplar panel is the support, and it has caused trouble: the wood has warped over the centuries and a crack runs down from the top edge, so the picture is kept in a climate-controlled case.
Q 15Which Leonardo painting in the Louvre shows Mary seated on her mother's lap?
The Virgin and Child with Saint Anne
The Virgin and Child with Saint Anne was still unfinished when Leonardo died; a 2011 cleaning left it so much brighter that two experts resigned from the Louvre's advisory committee in protest.
Q 16Who stole the Mona Lisa from the Louvre in 1911?
Vincenzo Peruggia
Vincenzo Peruggia, an Italian workman who had helped build the picture's glass case, walked out with it in August 1911; Apollinaire was arrested and Picasso questioned before the thief was found.
Q 17How was the Mona Lisa's thief finally caught in 1913?
Offering it to a Florence art dealer
Offering it to a Florence art dealer undid him: the dealer brought the Uffizi's director to authenticate the picture, and the police then arrested the thief at his hotel.
Q 18On what day of the week was the Mona Lisa stolen in 1911?
Monday, the weekly closing day
Monday, the weekly closing day, meant only staff and workmen were about; the thief left by a service door, and nobody raised the alarm until a painter came to copy the picture the next day.
Q 19What Guinness World Record does the Mona Lisa hold?
Highest insurance valuation
Highest insurance valuation: the Mona Lisa was assessed at 100 million dollars before its 1962 trip to America, but the policy was never bought because tight security cost less than the premiums.
Q 20In 1956 a Bolivian visitor damaged the Mona Lisa by throwing what at it?
A rock
A rock thrown by Ugo Ungaza Villegas in December 1956 shattered the glass and dislodged a speck of pigment near the left elbow; bulletproof glass was installed afterwards.
An apple held in a marble hand found with the statue suggests the Judgement of Paris, in which Aphrodite won the golden apple; whether the hand belongs to her is debated.
Q 24The Winged Victory of Samothrace stands on a base shaped like what?
The prow of a ship
The prow of a ship: its grey marble blocks were left on Samothrace in 1863 as the remains of a tomb, and reached the Louvre only in 1879, after Austrian archaeologists worked out what they formed.
Q 25Where in the Louvre does the Winged Victory of Samothrace stand?
Atop a grand staircase
Atop a grand staircase: the Louvre set her on the Daru stairs' upper landing in the 1880s, a nod to the height on Samothrace from which she once looked out over the sanctuary.
Q 26How did the Babylonian Code of Hammurabi stele end up in Iran?
As war spoils
As war spoils: an Elamite king is thought to have carried the stele off to Susa some 600 years after it was carved, and French archaeologists dug it up there in pieces.
Q 27The Louvre's Seated Scribe, carved in Egypt some 4,500 years ago, sits cross-legged with what on his lap?
A papyrus scroll
A papyrus scroll lies half-unrolled on his kilt, and a hole in one hand shows where a reed pen once sat; his inlaid crystal eyes still look startlingly alive.
Q 28Which Egyptologist became the first curator of the Louvre's Egyptian collection in the 1820s?
Jean-Francois Champollion
Jean-Francois Champollion had cracked the hieroglyphs in 1822; as curator he pressed Charles X to buy the collections of Henry Salt and Bernardino Drovetti, the core of today's department.
Q 29Which huge Veronese canvas, plundered from a Venetian monastery by French troops, is the Louvre's largest painting?
The Wedding at Cana
The Wedding at Cana was taken from the monks' refectory in Venice; in 1815 France kept it, arguing that it was too fragile to travel, and sent Venice a painting by Le Brun in exchange.
Q 30The frigate in Gericault's The Raft of the Medusa ran aground in 1816, bound for Senegal, off which coast?
Mauritania
Mauritania's coast is where the frigate struck a sandbank under a captain who had scarcely sailed in 20 years; nearly 150 people were left on a raft, and only 15 were alive when rescue came 13 days later.