Museums of the world that you can visit without leaving your home. Virtual museums of the world What is a virtual museum


Art always inspires. It reminds us of the diversity of the world and its beauty. It’s a pity that we often don’t have enough time and money to visit museums where masterpieces of past centuries await. How to visit the most famous museums in the world without queuing and without tickets? How to visit the Louvre, Prado and Hermitage in one weekend?


How can you catch a tour in order to get a good look at the skull of a Neanderthal or the painting on an ancient Greek vase? How to show your child paintings by famous artists? There is only one answer to all questions - go on a virtual tour. Incredible Google Art Project, offers such tours to the best museums.


"Starry Night" Vincent Van Gogh

One of the most famous and visited museums in the world. In it you can see not only works of our time, but also the originals of “Starry Night” by Vincent van Gogh and “Hope II” by Gustav Klimt. The virtual tour offers unusual exhibits of our time: original costumes, photographs, posters, sculptures and psychogeographic paintings by Mark Bradford.


Hans Holbein "The Ambassadors"

You can definitely spend the whole day here! The museum contains paintings from the 13th to 20th centuries. We recommend checking out “The Madonna of the Rocks” by Leonardo da Vinci, “Venus and Mars” by Sandro Botticelli and “Allegory of Prudence” by Titian. These and other masterpieces are available in a virtual exhibition.


"At the Conservatory" Edouard Manet

The German museum contains 19th-century paintings in the styles of classicism, romanticism, impressionism and early modernism. The paintings by Edouard Manet “At the Conservatory”, Gustave Courbet’s “The Wave” and Caspar David Friedrich’s “Monk by the Sea” deserve special attention. You can walk around the entire museum complex. True, some paintings remained without signatures.


"Battle of Aboukir" Antoine-Jean Gros

A place where everyone will feel royal grandeur. With the help of the Art Project, you can not only look at famous paintings (“The Death of Marat” by Jacques Louis David, “The Meeting of Eleazar with Rebekah” by Paolo Veronese, “Hercules Supports Victory” by Jean Jouvenet), but also trace how one of the most luxurious palaces in history. The virtual tour also offers a walk through a realistic park.


“Girl with Peaches” Valentin Serov

Art lovers will not find a more complete collection of works by artists from Russia than here. Our favorites are “The Black Sea” by Ivan Aivazovsky, “The Emerald Necklace” by Viktor Borisov-Musatov, “The Lady in Blue” by Konstantin Somov and “Girl with Peaches” by Valentin Serov.


"The Hungarian Gypsy" by Amrita Sher-Gil

Want to know more about Indian art? Then choose this museum. The paintings will help you get acquainted with a completely different culture. The museum displays not only the works of Indian artists, but also paintings by Europeans that were created in India. It is worth paying attention to Amrita Sher-Gil, who is often compared to Frida Kahlo.


"Birth of Venus" by Sandro Botticelli

The most visited museum in Italy. It seems that you can watch “The Birth of Venus” by Sandro Botticelli for hours! Also in the Uffizi you can see “The Adoration of the Magi” and “The Annunciation” by Leonardo da Vinci, “Flora” by Titian, “The Musical Angel” by Rosso Fiorentino and other famous paintings.


“Van Gogh Paints Sunflowers” ​​Paul Gauguin

The number one place for all admirers of the work of the Dutch post-impressionist. By the way, the museum in Amsterdam will offer you to look not only at the paintings of Vincent van Gogh (“Sunflowers”, “The Potato Eaters”, “Bedroom in Arles”), but also at the works of his talented contemporaries (for example, Pablo Picasso and Paul Gauguin).


"Guernica" by Pablo Picasso

Not only is there an incredible art museum, but there is also a large library. We advise you to evaluate the works of the avant-garde artist Juan Gris (“Bottle of Anise del Mono”, “Open Window”, “Violin and Guitar”). The main exhibit of the museum is considered to be “Guernica” by Pablo Picasso.

A museum that will tell you almost everything about British art. It contains works from 1500 to the present day. We love popping in here to revisit John Everett Millais's Ophelia, James Whistler's Nocturne, and William Turner's The Blizzard.

The Chapel of Sainte-Chapelle is not exactly a museum, but one of the most famous and amazing monuments of Gothic architecture. Its incredibly beautiful stained glass windows tell the story of human history: a total of 1,113 scenes are depicted here. Surprisingly, many of the stained glass windows that can be seen in the Sainte-Chapelle today have been preserved since the 13th century, even surviving the French Revolution (while many Christian relics kept in the chapel were destroyed). An online tour gives you an idea of ​​the beauty of this place, but if you want to take a closer look at the stained glass windows, it is better to visit the chapel in person.

As part of the virtual tour, you can visit only a few halls of the main historical and archaeological museum of Britain - those located on its first floor. But many exhibits can be viewed in large format. The collection of graphics and engravings by Michelangelo deserves special attention here.

This is the number one place for all admirers of the work of the surrealist artist Salvador Dali. A virtual tour is available on the museum's website. You can only walk through some of the exhibition halls, but don’t be in a hurry to get upset: the virtual exhibition features such famous works by Dali as “Room with the Face of Mae West” and “Rainy Taxi”.

An incredible Renaissance monument. Botticelli, Perugino, and Ghirlandaio worked on the frescoes decorating the walls of the chapel. Truly legendary - the fresco “The Last Judgment” by Michelangelo. Usually there are a lot of people in the Sistine Chapel, and it is quite difficult to see all the amazing paintings. Therefore, a virtual tour is a real salvation. Enjoy!

The museum dedicated to the great writer is worth visiting for everyone! You can take a walk through the “bad apartment” No. 50 (according to the plot of “The Master and Margarita”, Woland lived in it) virtually. You will have a chance to look into Bulgakov’s office, visit the living room, and see the “communal kitchen” exhibition. The exhibits presented in the museum are digitized, so they can be examined slowly and in detail.

Tells almost everything about contemporary art. The museum is famous not only for its exhibition, but also for its unusual building in the form of an inverted tower. Visitors first go up to the top floor, and then inspect the exhibition in a spiral and go down. Thanks to the online tour, everyone has the opportunity to repeat the route! In addition, the exhibits presented in the virtual collection can be carefully examined in all details.

Of course, virtual museums cannot replace real excursions. But such Internet forays, especially if you are with your child, will help you better understand him and plan a family vacation program. Have a pleasant and educational time!


There is no doubt that any historical artifact or work of art is best seen in person. But not always and not everyone has the opportunity to travel a lot around the world. Fortunately, today, in the modern digital age, it is possible to visit some of the world's most famous museums from the comfort of your own home. Our review contains some of the museums that invite you to virtual tours.

1. Louvre


The Louvre is not only one of the world's largest art museums, it is also one of Paris's most iconic historical monuments. The museum offers free online tours, during which you can see some of the Louvre's most famous and popular exhibits, such as Egyptian relics.

2. Solomon Guggenheim Museum


While it would be worth seeing for yourself the unique architecture of the Guggenheim building, which was designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, you don't have to fly to New York to see some of the museum's priceless artifacts. You can see it online works by Franz Marc, Piet Mondrian, Picasso and Jeff Koons.

3. National Gallery of Art


Founded in 1937 National Gallery of Art open to the public. For those who cannot come to Washington, the museum provides virtual tours of its galleries and exhibitions. For example, you can admire masterpieces such as paintings by Van Gogh and sculptures from ancient Angkor. "

4. British Museum


The British Museum's collection includes more than eight million objects. Today, a world-famous museum from London introduced possibility of viewing online some of its exhibitions, such as "Kenga: Textiles from Africa" ​​and "Objects from the Roman cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum". In collaboration with the Google Cultural Institute, the British Museum offers virtual tours using Google Street View technology.

5. National Museum of Natural History at the Smithsonian Institution


The National Museum in Washington, which is one of the most visited museums in the world, offers the opportunity to take a look at its beautiful treasures through an online virtual tour. An online guide welcomes spectators into the rotunda, followed by online tour(with a 360-degree view) through the “Hall of Mammals,” “Hall of Insects,” “Dinosaur Zoo,” and “Hall of Paleobiology.”

6. Metropolitan Museum of Art


The Met is home to more than two million works of fine art, but you don't have to travel to New York to admire them. The museum's website features virtual tours of some of the most impressive works, including paintings by Van Gogh, Jackson Pollock and Giotto di Bondone. In addition, the Metropolitan also cooperates with Google Cultural Institute to make even more works available for viewing.

7. Dali Theater-Museum


Located in the Catalan city of Figueres, the Dalí Theater and Museum is entirely dedicated to the art of Salvador Dalí. It houses many exhibitions and artifacts related to each stage of Dalí's life and career. The artist himself is buried here. The museum offers virtual tours from some of their exhibitions.

8. NASA


NASA is offering virtual tours of its space center in Houston. An animated robot named "Audima" acts as a guide.

9. Vatican Museums


Curated by Popes for centuries, the Vatican Museums have an extensive collection of art and classical sculpture. You can take advantage of the opportunity to tour the museum grounds, seeing some of the most iconic exhibits on your computer screen, including the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, painted by Michelangelo.

10. National Women's History Museum


Officials at the National Women's History Museum in Alexandria, Virginia, say the museum was founded to inspire learning about the past and shaping the future "by integrating the history and culture of women's lives in the United States." In mode virtual tour] You can see museum exhibits showcasing women's lives during World War II and the struggle for women's rights throughout American history.

11. US Air Force National Museum


National Museum of the United States Air Force located at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio. It houses a huge collection of military weapons and aircraft, including presidential aircraft of Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower, John Kennedy and Richard Nixon. The museum also offers free virtual tours of its grounds, where you can see decommissioned aircraft from World War II, the Vietnam War and the Korean War.

12. Google Art Project


To help users find and view important works of art online in high resolution and detail, Google works with more than 60 museums and galleries around the world to archive and document priceless works of art, as well as provide virtual tours of museums that use Google Street View technology.

Today, I am pleased to present to you the best selection of domestic and foreign virtual museums and exhibitions.

A virtual museum is a kind of visual guide to a museum that allows you to visit the exhibition halls of famous museums without leaving your computer monitors.

Let's start, sir.

Thanks to this site, you can take a full tour with a guide around the Hermitage, without problems, moving from room to room, using easy and convenient navigation.


With the help of the soundtrack of our famous actor Alexei Batalov, you can take a tour of the Kremlin buildings. Also, you will be presented with beautiful views of the Kremlin from different points.


This is perhaps one of the most advanced virtual museums in the world, and is somewhat reminiscent of a 3D computer game. Using a virtual tour of the Louvre, you can receive comprehensive information about all the objects that interest you. Also, you can closely and carefully examine any picture.


On the White House website, by choosing a virtual tour, you can get acquainted with the interior of the building - the refuge of American presidents. Also, you will see photographs of the interiors, descriptions of all rooms, 3D images of the Oval Office.


An excellent site for those people who do not yet have high-speed Internet. Even with slow Internet, you can visit the halls of Egypt, Japan, Latin America, Asia and Europe of one of the most famous museums in Europe.


The New York Museum is one of the most famous museums dedicated to everything related to film, television and video game production.


The history of television and radio is also the history of national culture, the history of our country, and therefore rich, interesting and attractive. The virtual museum “Radio and Television” is dedicated to these topics.


Without exaggeration, the most famous wax museum, Madame Tussauds, invites you to take a most interesting virtual tour of its halls. Here you will find figures of the world's most famous actors, singers, presidents and politicians.

Anna Ionova / 09/01/2016

The development of the Internet, databases and multimedia technologies has allowed the phenomenon of the virtual museum to occupy its niche in the world of culture and art in the intangible information space. Virtual museums appeared in the 90s of the last century and have been actively continuing their development since then. Online museums have some advantages over regular museums. The virtual museum is open around the clock on weekends and holidays, and you can use it absolutely free. There are no queues for tickets, and visiting time is not limited. Exhibitions in a virtual museum can last for years, and the exhibits retain their original condition and do not deteriorate under any circumstances.

In a virtual museum, exhibits from different real-life museums can coexist, and the number of exhibits is not limited by the volume of premises and storage rooms, as is the case in real museums. Visitors to such museums can take virtual walks through the halls of the museum, get acquainted with its collections, and in some museums they can view exhibits from all sides using 3D models, and guides are successfully replaced by audio recordings of excursions or information certificates. In addition, some museums contain large amounts of additional information (including films, audio recordings, animations) or links to it, which allows you to study the issue in more detail.

The main goal of a virtual museum is no different from the goal of a real museum - it is to educate people and familiarize them with the world heritage of human history and culture. Of course, it will be difficult for true connoisseurs to replace the original on the wall in a museum with a photograph on the Internet, but for many categories of people, a virtual museum is an opportunity to see masterpieces, at least through a monitor screen. We are talking about people who cannot afford to travel to another city or country to visit a museum, or about people with limited physical capabilities. Virtual museums are of great importance for scientists and researchers in the field of cultural studies, history, and art history, since they need constant open access to works, sometimes located on different ends of the planet.

Virtual museums, like “material” ones, store cultural heritage, only it is in electronic digitized form. Digitization sometimes becomes the only opportunity to see the original of an exhibit - some ancient and dilapidated objects are always stored in storage rooms protected from external influences, and copies are put on display for visitors. In addition, the digitized tome can be “flipped through” completely, and in the museum viewers will be shown only an open book under glass, without the ability to read other pages. Digitization serves another important purpose - the restoration and restoration of cultural heritage damaged or completely lost as a result of natural disasters, wars, and terrorist attacks. This applies not only to individual objects, but also to entire buildings, park ensembles and other larger categories of cultural and historical monuments.

The concept of “virtual museum” in a broad sense has two meanings:

    Representation of a real-life museum on the Internet;

    A true virtual museum, that is, a resource that stores and displays collections of works, materials, etc. for everyone to see. in the museum space, located exclusively on the Internet.

The first meaning is widespread throughout the world. Almost every famous museum has virtual tours of buildings, reviews of exhibits, virtual tours of individual exhibitions, that is, an electronic version of a real museum or part of it. As a rule, a virtual trip can be made directly on the official website of the museum. So you can get acquainted with the masterpieces of the Paris Louvre, the New York Guggenheim Museum, take a virtual walk through the George Washington Museum Mount Vernon or get to the White House. There are excellent virtual tours on the website of the National Museum of Natural History in Washington and on the Hermitage website. Virtual collections of exhibits can be found on the website of the Moscow Kremlin museums, the Museum of Fine Arts. A.S. Pushkin and many other Russian and foreign museums. In addition to virtual tours, official websites contain announcements of exhibitions, up-to-date information on ticket prices, museum hours and operating hours, an online store, a map and much more. In this context, the virtual museum serves to attract visitors to the real museum. There are also sites that host virtual tours, for example, for Russian museums these are the sites http://www.panotours.ru/ or http://www.culture.ru/.


Virtual tour of the Tsarskoye Selo Museum-Reserve. ( http://www.culture.ru )

The Google Culture Institute and its Google Arts&Culture project have made a global contribution to the development of electronic culture. The project started in 2011 and now provides access to a huge collection of exhibits from hundreds of private collections, archives and museums located around the world. There are 3 sections on the site - “Art”, “History” and “Wonders of the World”, so here you can not only see digitized copies of world masterpieces, but also virtually visit the most famous museums and historical monuments like Stonehenge or the Egyptian pyramids. Photo panoramas with a 360-degree view are made in excellent quality, which allows you to see the smallest details, and the filter system helps you find the necessary material according to various criteria - artists, movements, techniques, objects, and even the main color.


Prague National Theatre, Czech Republic. ( https://www.google.com/culturalinstitute )

“Virtual museum” in the second meaning does not have a real museum on the basis of which it could be based, but at the same time it has its own structure, collection of exhibits, catalogs and much more, that is, in fact, the structure of a virtual museum can serve as a framework for a virtual museum. material" museum. The virtual museum also has some idea or theme of the exhibits, on the basis of which it is “built” and developed. The implementation of a virtual museum is an information resource (usually a website, web page, disk) intended for the presentation of museum materials, which has expanded capabilities for their search and classification, additional interactive and multimedia means of demonstrating works. Such virtual museums are created by cultural institutions, schools, universities, libraries, and private commercial organizations. The topics of virtual museums can be very different - historical (Hampson Virtual Museum - virtual archaeological museum, Virtual Museum of the Gulag), artistic (Virtual Museum of Canada, Europeana - electronic collection of European art and printing, MOCA: Museum of Computer Art), educational (Virtual Museum computer science, Museum of Television and Radio on the Internet, Virtual Computer Museum, Thngs.co Museum of Things, NASA educational project), entertainment (Virtual Museum of Steam Locomotives, The Virtual Shoe Museum).


NASA Virtual Museum. ( http://www.nasa.gov )

Any virtual museum must provide good quality content (digitization, photography and video recording), meaningful exhibitions (the presence of metadata, information and historical references, audio guides), focus on the general public and ease of interface, navigation, and search for the necessary data. All these components transform an ordinary website with a set of photographs into a virtual museum. As for clear rules for organizing virtual museums, for example, in Russia in 2014, the Ministry of Culture of the Russian Federation released “Technical recommendations for creating virtual museums.” They mainly relate to the representation of real museums on the Internet, but some of these recommendations can also be used when creating a museum based exclusively in virtual space. Thus, the recommendations establish the minimum acceptable resolution of photographs on the short side of 800-2000 pixels, the encoding format is JPEG or JPEG-2000, for panoramic photos the viewing angle along the horizontal axis should be 360 ​​degrees and along the vertical axis - 180 degrees, it is recommended to use integration with social networks and etc. The result of creating a virtual museum should be an information and educational resource that stores the historical and cultural heritage and presents it to visitors in excellent quality.

Virtual museums have great potential, which has not yet been fully appreciated in Russia. Digital cultural heritage is becoming increasingly important, and the time is not far off when it will become a separate art form, like cinema or computer games. And the latest technologies - virtual and augmented reality, panoramic video - will in the future make visiting a virtual museum almost real.

Everything is moving, everything is moving forward. With the development of scientific and technological progress in our world, a huge number of all kinds of wonderful changes occur that shock society. Progress has also reached art. Today we will talk about virtual museums of the world.

What is a virtual museum?

The name is very interesting, but not particularly clear. How is it - virtual museum? Is there anything like this in the world? And for older people, it will be completely difficult to understand such an expression. Well, let's try to explain in more detail.

It's actually easier to show than to tell. Take for example such a world-famous museum as. On our website you can read detailed information about this museum, but more accurate information will be provided by the official website of the museum, which you can visit at (https://www.hermitagemuseum.org/). We go to this site and find there such a link as “virtual visit” - it sounds tempting, doesn’t it?

After we follow the link provided above, we will be able to fully, virtually, enjoy any of the museum’s halls, and we will even be able to observe the view from the roof of this museum. Of course, many will ask how is all this organized? Is there really a big difference? The main thing is that now, from anywhere in the world, we can calmly, using the Internet, enjoy beautiful paintings kindly provided by the developers of the Hermitage website.

Why are virtual museums needed?

The answer is on the surface and suggests itself - to be closer to art! To find this or that picture at any time! To show this or that work of art, if it is not possible to visit a specific museum.

Virtual museums there are a huge variety in the world, and if you are a creative person who appreciates art, then a virtual visit will save you both time and money, and you will get no less pleasure! Enjoy your virtual walks.


Oh yeah, I almost forgot when talking about virtual museums of the world, it would simply be stupid not to mention the project that was launched by the Google search engine itself. This is a truly brilliant project (https://artsandculture.google.com/). Be sure to visit this site. You can find almost any museum in the world there. It is possible to select a language. The project is very young and continues to develop. Google, as we all know, is a very serious company, and they took the time to devote it to such important topics as art and culture, for which we thank them very much!