About This Quiz
Every year, millions of people swarm to the best museums, hoping to see both natural wonders and the human imagination at its finest. How much do you know about the world's top museums?MoMA is an iconic art museum in New York. It's technically called the Museum of Modern Art, but everyone just refers to it as MoMA.
The National Museum of Natural History, which is administered by the Smithsonian Institution, is America's most-visited museum. It's also one of the most popular museums in the world.
Taiwan's National Palace Museum features scads of ancient Chinese art. Almost all of the pieces were initially collected by Chinese emperors.
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The National Gallery is located in London, England. It features more than 2,300 paintings, including some of the most famous paintings in history.
Do you see dead people? You will at the National Museum of Natural History. You'll see human remains, plant remains, animal remains and more dead stuff than you can shake a fossilized femur at.
The "Mona Lisa" is probably the most famous piece of art in the history of civilization. It's been hanging at the Louvre in Paris since the 1790s, except for the time it was stolen in 1911 and when it was hidden from the Nazis during WWII.
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The Palace Museum is renowned for its exquisite ceramics collections, and many porcelain pieces, too. Combined with all other artwork, the museum has more than 1 million pieces of priceless art and artifacts.
The Vatican Museums include the Sistine Chapel, which has the most famous ceiling frescoes in the world, painted by Michelangelo in the early 1500s.
Curators hastily packed up what they could and shipped the exhibits to safe houses in the French countryside. The Nazis "reopened" the Louvre during the occupation… but it was mostly empty.
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Sorry, alien lovers, the International UFO Museum is not in the top ten. This other-worldly museum is located in Roswell, New Mexico, near Area 51.
The Uffizi Gallery has many priceless works from the Italian Renaissance. If you like Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo, this is a great place to visit.
In 1958, maintenance workers accidentally started a fire at the famed museum. The flames ruined two Monet water lilies paintings.
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The Netherlands is home to Amsterdam's Van Gogh museum. Van Gogh was 27 before he decided to become an artist, then he proceeded to change the world of art forever.
The Louvre features a massive glass pyramid that was completed in 1988. The huge glass pyramid has become one of the museum's most recognizable architectural features.
The National Museum of Korea is located in Seoul, South Korea. It was established in 1945 after the country gained its independence…and then many of the pieces almost had to be immediately moved again, due to the outbreak of the Korean War.
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The Hermitage Museum is located in Saint Petersburg, Russia. Founded by Elizabeth of Russia and Catherine the Great in the 1750s and 1760s, it sees more than 3.5 million visitors per year.
Frank Lloyd designed the Guggenheim in New York in the U.S.; Frank Gehry designed the Guggenheim Bilbao in Bilbao, Spain.
The Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina SofÃa, or simply Reina SofÃa, is in Madrid, Spain. It was officially inaugurated in 1992. The museum is the home of Picasso's "Guernica" and "Woman in Blue."
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D.C.'s National Gallery of Art has a famous Sculpture Garden. The garden's 6 acres were opened in 1999 and often feature gigantic pieces that stretch toward the sky.
France's Louvre is the biggest museum on the planet. It has an exhibition area that sprawls more than 780,000 square feet, and it contains more than 35,000 works of art.
The Louvre was originally a fortress that dates all the way back to the beginning of the 13th century. It's been used as a palace and is now one of the world's most famous museums.
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The National Gallery of Art was established in 1937, thanks in large part to a filthy-rich guy named Andrew Mellon, a businessman. He also served as Secretary of the Treasury... just before the U.S. nosedived into the Great Depression.
Beijing boasts the most-visited museum in the world. It's home to the Palace Museum, which hosts around 16 million visitors per year. It's located in Beijing's Forbidden City.
The British Museum, which opened its doors in the 1750s, has just about anything you can imagine, from primitive artifacts to modern art. It has approximately 8 million objects in its collection.
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The Pergamon Museum in Berlin is home to the Pergamon Altar, a simply massive stairway made from enormous slabs of stone (although it has been under renovation since 2014). You'll also see the Ishtar Gate of Babylon and the Market Gate of Miletus, both rebuilt using remnants excavated in the Middle East.
The British Museum contains the Queen Elizabeth II Great Court, which is usually just called the Great Court. The visually striking roof sits over the biggest covered square in all of Europe.
The curators of the National Museum of Natural History hoard plant and animal remains like obsessive serial killers. The museum boasts more than 126 million specimens in its enormous collection.
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The Pompidou in Paris has many systems visible and color-coded. Yellow is for electric, green is for plumbing, blue is for air conditioning, and red is for elevators.
Tate Modern is a modern art gallery, much like the MoMA in New York City. The museum is housed in a big old power station, the Bankside Power Station, which closed in the early '80s.
The Capitoline Museums, in Rome, Italy, is considered the oldest museum in the world. In spite of the name it's considered a single museum, and it's been open to the public since the 1470s.
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