Museum Trivia
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97 free Museum trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
44 free Museum trivia questions with answers. Museums are where civilizations keep their receipts, and their own stories are just as good as their collections. This quiz ranges from a Babylonian princess's cabinet of antiquities and the temple of the Muses at Alexandria to the Louvre's glass pyramid, the Smithsonian's 21 museums, Sue the T. rex, the Gardner heist and the Museum of Bad Art. Expect questions on founders and architects, famous objects and thefts, the oldest and biggest institutions, and a few gloriously odd ones. About a third are easy for anyone who has spent a rainy afternoon in a gallery, a third are medium and the rest are for docents and habitual gift-shop visitors. Every answer is checked against the museum's reference page.
30 of 97 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01The word 'museum' comes from a Greek term for a shrine dedicated to whom?
The Muses
The Muses, goddesses of the arts, were honoured at a mouseion; the famous one in Alexandria was an institute where scholars lived and studied, not a place for showing works of art.
Q 02Around 530 BC, the Babylonian princess Ennigaldi kept what is often called the first museum in which modern country?
Iraq
Iraq is home to Ur, where Leonard Woolley dug up her collection in the 1920s: objects centuries apart in age lay together with clay labels in three languages, which is why he called it a museum.
Q 03Which Oxford institution, opened in 1683, is Britain's first public museum?
The Ashmolean
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.
Q 04The British Museum, established in 1753, was founded on the collections of which physician?
Sir Hans Sloane
Sir Hans Sloane left his 71,000 objects to the nation on condition that Parliament pay his heirs £20,000, far below their worth; a public lottery raised the money.
Q 05Which British Museum object did British forces take from the French in Egypt in 1801?
The Rosetta Stone
The Rosetta Stone was handed over under the 1801 Capitulation of Alexandria; because it repeats one decree in hieroglyphic, Demotic and Greek, it let Champollion crack the hieroglyphs in the 1820s.
Q 06The Louvre first opened as a museum during which period?
The French Revolution
The French Revolution turned the former royal palace into a public museum: it opened on 10 August 1793, a year to the day after the monarchy fell, to show the nation the royal art collections.
Q 07Which architect designed the glass pyramid that became the Louvre's main entrance?
I. M. Pei
I. M. Pei was appointed in 1983 under President Mitterrand's Grand Louvre plan; critics called his glass pyramid an outrage before it opened in 1989, yet it became the symbol of the museum.
Q 08Which painter was questioned over the Mona Lisa's 1911 theft from the Louvre?
Pablo Picasso
Pablo Picasso was brought in for questioning and cleared; the real thief, former Louvre worker Vincenzo Peruggia, kept the painting for more than two years before he was caught in Florence in 1913.
Q 09Which French king, Leonardo da Vinci's last patron, acquired the Mona Lisa?
Francis I
Francis I invited Leonardo to France in 1516 and acquired the portrait the artist brought with him; that is why Italy's most famous painting belongs to France.
Q 10The Louvre began as a medieval fortress guarding Paris against attack from Normandy, then held by which kingdom?
England
England's kings still held Normandy, so Philip II put the fortress at the western end of his new wall around Paris, the side most exposed to an attack from there.
Q 11The Metropolitan Museum of Art's main building sits on which New York thoroughfare?
Fifth Avenue
Fifth Avenue at 82nd Street has been the Met's home since 1880, when it moved to the edge of Central Park after eight years in temporary quarters farther downtown; its first show opened in 1872.
Q 12What is the popular centerpiece of the Metropolitan Museum's Egyptian Art department?
The Temple of Dendur
The Temple of Dendur was Egypt's gift to the United States in 1965, in thanks for help saving Nubia's monuments from the waters of the Aswan High Dam; the Met has shown it in a glass-walled wing since 1978.
Q 13Which British scientist, who never visited America, left his fortune to the United States to found a national institution?
Q 21Which architect designed New York's spiral Guggenheim Museum, completed in 1959?
Frank Lloyd Wright
Frank Lloyd Wright took the commission in 1943 and died six months before the museum opened in October 1959; even avant-garde artists complained that his building would compete with the art inside.
Q 22The Vatican Museums trace their origin to which ancient sculpture, unearthed in a Roman vineyard in 1506?
Laocoön and His Sons
Laocoön and His Sons came out of the ground on the Esquiline Hill in 1506; Michelangelo was among the first called to see it, and Pope Julius II bought it at once for his statue court.
Q 23Which room comes last on the visitor route through the Vatican Museums?
James Smithson
James Smithson's will sent his fortune to America only if his nephew died childless, which happened in 1835; Congress then argued for a decade before creating the Smithsonian in 1846.
Q 14Which Smithsonian museum houses the Hope Diamond?
National Museum of Natural History
National Museum of Natural History staff received the 45.52-carat blue diamond in 1958 through the post: jeweller Harry Winston sent it by registered mail in a box wrapped in brown paper.
Q 15Florence's Uffizi takes its name from the Italian word for what?
Offices
Offices is what 'uffizi' means: Vasari began the building in 1560 to bring the magistrates and public offices of Cosimo I de' Medici's Florence under one roof.
Q 16Which Madrid museum holds Goya's 'Black Paintings'?
The Prado
The Prado holds all fourteen: Goya painted them straight onto the walls of his house, and decades after his death a later owner had them transferred to canvas.
Q 17Which empress founded the Hermitage Museum in 1764?
Catherine the Great
Catherine the Great began the Hermitage in 1764 to house her private art collection; the public was not admitted until 1852, under Tsar Nicholas I.
Q 18The Hermitage's main complex includes which former imperial residence?
The Winter Palace
The Winter Palace was the tsars' official residence until 1917, when Red Guards took it from the Provisional Government in the October Revolution; today it is the main building of the museum.
Q 19Which architect designed the Rijksmuseum's main building, opened in Amsterdam in 1885?
Pierre Cuypers
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.
Q 20Dalí's The Persistence of Memory hangs in which New York museum?
MoMA
MoMA has held it since 1934, when an anonymous donor gave the canvas three years after Dalí painted it; it measures only about 24 by 33 centimetres.
The Sistine Chapel
The Sistine Chapel closes the route, yet it is still a working chapel: under Michelangelo's ceiling the cardinals gather for the conclave that elects each new pope.
Q 24Which Paris museum occupies a former railway station?
The Musée d'Orsay
The Musée d'Orsay fills the Gare d'Orsay, which lost its long-distance trains by 1939 and was due to be torn down for a hotel until the culture minister stepped in; it reopened as a museum in 1986.
Q 25Which London gallery fills the former Bankside Power Station?
Tate Modern
Tate Modern kept the station's vast Turbine Hall as its entrance: the machinery was stripped out, and the hall now hosts giant commissions, the first by Louise Bourgeois in 2000.
Q 26Which skeleton replaced Dippy the Diplodocus at London's Natural History Museum in 2017?
A blue whale
A blue whale has hung there since 2017, chosen to stand for its species' recovery after decades of commercial hunting; Dippy, a plaster cast shown since 1905, went on a tour of Britain.
Q 27New York's natural history museum on Central Park West stands in a park named after which president?
Theodore Roosevelt
Theodore Roosevelt Park was plain Manhattan Square until 1958, when the city renamed it for the president; his bronze statue stood at the museum's entrance from 1940 until it was removed in 2022.
Q 28What disguise got two thieves into Boston's Gardner Museum for the 1990 art heist?
Police officers
Police officers' uniforms got them buzzed in after they claimed to be answering a disturbance; they handcuffed the guards and took 13 works, and the museum still hangs the empty frames.
Q 29The Concert, stolen from Boston's Gardner Museum in 1990, was painted by which Dutch master?
Johannes Vermeer
Johannes Vermeer has only about 35 paintings to his name, so losing one is a rare blow; the thieves lifted it out of its frame the night they cut two Rembrandts from theirs.
Q 30Sue the T. rex is the star of which Chicago museum?
The Field Museum
The Field Museum won Sue at a 1997 auction for about $8.4 million, then a record for a fossil, with help from McDonald's and Disney, after a five-year custody fight over the bones.