The World's Greatest Art Museums

Podcast Transcript

For thousands of years, human beings have created works of art.

Many of these works were commissioned by monarchs, merchants, or religious leaders.

Over time, many of these great works have found their way into the hands of art museums.

Museums allow everyone to enjoy and appreciate art that has been produced around the world over the course of centuries.

However, not all museums are created equal.

Learn more about the world’s greatest art museums and what makes them great on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily.

This episode is going to be a bit different.

I want to go over the world’s greatest art museums, which is an inherently subjective exercise.

You may have your own list and recommendations for what should be included, and that’s fine. There is no right or wrong when it comes to something like this, and if I should leave off a museum that you love, feel free to leave a comment on Facebook, Discord, or Spotify.

I do have one thing going for me in terms of making such a list, and that is, I’ve personally been to most of them. If you search for “greatest art museums,” you’ll come up with a list that isn’t radically different from mine. There is a fair amount of consensus on the subject, although it isn’t perfect.

Most of these museums are situated in major world cities. That is because, to assemble a world-class art collection, at some point, someone had to procure everything. That required a king, an emperor, a pope, or one or more very wealthy merchants. It also probably required several generations of art collecting.

I’m evaluating museums based on the breadth and depth of their collection. That means there are great museums that are certainly worth visiting, but just didn’t make the list.

Also, these are in no particular order. Making the list was challenging enough, and I didn’t want to start ranking them on top of it.

I’ll also note that every item on my list is a museum I’ve personally visited.

So, with that, I’ll start in Asia. To be honest, there aren’t a lot on my list in Asia.

The first is the National Palace Museum in Taiwan. You might wonder why I’d put a museum in Taiwan over a museum in, say, mainland China?

The National Palace Museum in Taipei traces its origins to the imperial art collections of China’s emperors, which had been housed for centuries in Beijing’s Forbidden City.

After the fall of the Qing dynasty in 1911, these treasures were nationalized by the Republic of China. They formed the core of the Palace Museum, established in 1925 within the former imperial palace. During the Second Sino-Japanese War, thousands of the most valuable objects were evacuated from Beijing to protect them from bombing and looting, moving across China through the 1930s and 1940s.

When the Chinese Civil War turned against the Nationalists in 1948–49, about 600,000 of the most important pieces were secretly shipped to Taiwan for safekeeping. These works formed the foundation of the National Palace Museum in Taipei, which opened in 1965, and preserve one of the world’s richest collections of Chinese art, spanning over 8,000 years.

Two of the most famous items in their collection are the Meat-shaped Stone and the Jadeite Cabbage. These are literally a piece of stone that looks like a piece of pork belly, and a piece of jadeite that looks like napa cabbage. They are much more famous in China and Taiwan than they are in the West.

The next great museum is in Africa, and I have to put an asterisk next to it. The Egyptian Museum in Cairo.

The Egyptian Museum is in the heart of Cairo on Tahrir Square and has the largest collection of Egyptian artifacts in the world. The building dates back to 1902, and it is the classical old-school encyclopedic museum.

The reason I put an asterisk next to this is that the Grand Egyptian Museum recently opened in Giza near the pyramids. This is a brand-new building and features many mummies of Pharaohs. They had a large parade to transport the mummies, which can be seen on YouTube.

I haven’t been to the Grand Egyptian Museum, but I did visit the Egyptian Museum, which had all the artifacts before the Grand Egyptian Museum opened.

If you want to see the artifacts from King Tut’s Tomb, which is now in the Grand Egyptian Museum.

The next museum on my list would be the Vatican Museum.

The Vatican Museum originated in 1506 when Pope Julius II acquired the ancient marble sculpture Laocoön and His Sons, discovered in a Roman vineyard, and placed it on public display in the Belvedere Courtyard. That act is often regarded as the birth of the collection.

Over the centuries, successive popes expanded it through archaeological finds, papal commissions, and purchases, creating one of the world’s greatest repositories of art and antiquities.

The collection features masterpieces by Michelangelo, Raphael, Leonardo da Vinci, and Caravaggio, along with extensive holdings of classical sculpture and ancient artifacts.

There are other great museums in Rome, such as the Galleria Borghese and the Capitoline Museum.

The other great museum in Italy is the Uffizi Gallery in Florence.

The Uffizi Gallery in Florence originated in 1560 when Duke Cosimo I de’ Medici commissioned Giorgio Vasari to design offices, or uffizi in Italian, for Florentine magistrates along the Arno River.

Over time, the upper floors of the building were used by the Medici family to display their vast art collection, and in 1769, the gallery was formally opened to the public, making it one of the first modern museums.

The Uffizi holds one of the world’s greatest collections of Renaissance art, featuring masterpieces such as Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus and Primavera, Leonardo da Vinci’s Annunciation, Michelangelo’s Doni Tondo, Raphael’s Madonna of the Goldfinch, Titian’s Venus of Urbino, and works by Giotto, Caravaggio, and Rembrandt.

Its collection charts the evolution of Italian painting from the Middle Ages through the Baroque era and stands as a testament to Florence’s central role in the history of art.

The museum and its collection were given to the state of Tuscany by Anna Maria Luisa de’ Medici in 1743.

The Galleria dell’Accademia in Florence is also worth visiting because it has Michelangelo’s David, but its collection drops off quickly after that.

The next museum on my list would be the Prado in Madrid, Spain.

The Prado was founded in 1819 as the Royal Museum of Paintings and Sculptures, originally concieved by King Charles III and opened under King Ferdinand VII and Queen Maria Isabel de Braganza to showcase the Spanish royal art collections.

Housed in a neoclassical building, the Prado became Spain’s premier art museum and one of the world’s finest. Its collection is focused on European painting from the 12th to the early 20th centuries, featuring an unparalleled collection of Spanish masters, including Velázquez, Goya, El Greco, and Murillo, as well as significant works by Titian, Rubens, Bosch, and Raphael.

Among its most famous pieces are Velázquez’s Las Meninas, Goya’s The Third of May 1808 and The Nude Maja, Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights, and Titian’s Emperor Charles V at Mühlberg.

Also receiving honorable mention in Madrid is the Museo Reina Sofía, known for its modern and contemporary art, including Picasso’s famous painting Guernica, and the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum.

The next museum should be one of the most obvious on the list, the Louvre in Paris.

I’ve dedicated an entire episode to the Louvre, but suffice it to say, it is the largest museum in the world, and it also houses the Mona Lisa, the most famous painting in the world.

If you ever visit, plan on spending the entire day there. You still won’t come close to seeing everything.

Not on the list but well worth visiting is the nearby Musée d’Orsay, which primarily features French art from 1848 to 1914, overlapping with the Impressionist period.

One of the best cities in the world for museums has to be London and the best museum in London is the British Museum.

The British Museum in London was founded in 1753 as the first national public museum in the world, established by an Act of Parliament to house the vast collections of the physician and naturalist Sir Hans Sloane, who had amassed around 80,000 objects spanning natural history, antiquities, and manuscripts.

It opened to the public in 1759 in Montagu House, which was later replaced by the current neoclassical building, designed by Sir Robert Smirke. Over the following centuries, the museum expanded through exploration, archaeology, imperial acquisitions, and good old-fashioned taking stuff.

Its most famous holdings include the Rosetta Stone, the Parthenon Marbles, Egyptian mummies, the Assyrian reliefs from Nineveh, the Sutton Hoo Anglo-Saxon artifacts, and the Lewis Chessmen.

There are other great museums in London, including the Victoria and Albert, the National Portrait Gallery, and the Tate Modern. There are actually over 250 museums in London, most of which have a niche focus.

The next museum is in another great museum city, the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam.

The Rijksmuseum was founded in 1800 in The Hague as the National Art Gallery to display the Dutch Republic’s most important art and historical objects, later moving to Amsterdam in 1808.

Its world-renowned collection includes masterpieces of the Dutch Golden Age, such as Rembrandt’s The Night Watch, Vermeer’s The Milkmaid and Woman Reading a Letter, Frans Hals’s The Merry Drinker, and works by Jan Steen and Van Gogh.

Other worthwhile museums in Amsterdam include the Van Gogh Museum and the Stedelijk Museum.

Before I mention the last museum on my list, I want to highlight several museums that might also be worthy of inclusion, but I haven’t listed them because I haven’t visited them.

The most obvious is the Hermitage in Saint Petersburg, Russia. I was outside the Hermitage, and I had every intention of visiting, but the lines were so long when I was there that I didn’t have enough time before I had to get back on my ship.

If you are interested in the Hermitage, I’d recommend the movie Russian Ark.. It was shot inside the museum, and it is notable because the entire movie was filmed in a single take.

I also haven’t been to the National Museum of China in Beijing, which is also probably worthy of inclusion.

The last museum on my list is the only one from the entire Western Hemisphere that I’m including, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City.

I think there is an argument to be made that the Met might be the world’s greatest museum.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art was founded in 1870 by a group of American businessmen, artists, and philanthropists, including John Jay and William Cullen Bryant, with the goal of bringing art and art education to the American public.

It opened in 1872 in a small building on Fifth Avenue before expanding into its current complex along Central Park. Today, it is one of the largest and most comprehensive museums in the world, with over two million works spanning 5,000 years of global culture.

The reason why I think the Met is superior to many European museums is that the items weren’t collected during a single period of time, and they don’t reflect a single country or region.

As a result, the Met collection is far more diverse and varied than any other great museum. They have paintings by the great masters, but they also have indigenous art from the South Pacific. They have a bit of everything, which really can’t be said for any other museum at this level.

Strong honorable mentions go to the Art Institute of Chicago, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., the Museum of Modern Art and the Guggenheim in New York, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the Getty in Los Angeles.

Some of you may have visited some of the museums I’ve mentioned, while others may never have even set foot in any of the cities or countries that host these museums.

Visit what you can. Most reasonably sized cities have something, and what they have can often be surprising. When I lived in Minneapolis, I visited the Minneapolis Institute of Art about every other month, and I learned a great deal by simply showing up and browsing.

But, if you should ever happen to find yourself in a city with any of the museums I’ve listed, you owe it to yourself to pay a visit.