Museum Trivia
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49 free Museum trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Aug 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 49 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01The word 'museum' comes from a Greek term for a temple dedicated to whom?
The Muses
The Muses, the nine goddesses of the arts and sciences, gave their name to the mouseion; the most famous was the Mouseion of Alexandria, founded under the early Ptolemies in the third century BC.
Q 02One of the oldest known museums was built around 530 BC by Princess Ennigaldi in which modern country?
Iraq
Ennigaldi's museum stood in Ur, in what is now southern Iraq; Leonard Woolley's excavators found its labelled Mesopotamian antiquities, dating to the last years of the Neo-Babylonian Empire.
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's 71,000 objects, bequeathed to the nation in 1753, formed the founding collection; the museum opened in Montagu House in 1759 as a free, public national museum.
Q 05Which British Museum object did British forces take from the French in Egypt in 1801?
The Rosetta Stone
The Rosetta Stone, seized under the 1801 Capitulation of Alexandria, carries a 196 BC decree in hieroglyphic, Demotic and Greek and has been on display since 1802.
Q 06The Louvre opened as a museum in 1793 with an exhibition of how many paintings?
537
The Louvre opened on 10 August 1793 showing 537 paintings and 184 other objects, most of them former royal property or works confiscated from the church during the Revolution.
Q 07Which architect designed the glass pyramid that became the Louvre's main entrance?
I. M. Pei
I. M. Pei was chosen personally by President Mitterrand in 1983, and his glass pyramid opened in 1989; the Inverted Pyramid in the underground Carrousel du Louvre followed in 1993.
Q 08Who stole the Mona Lisa from the Louvre in 1911?
Vincenzo Peruggia
Vincenzo Peruggia, an Italian handyman who had worked at the Louvre, hid it under his smock in August 1911 and claimed patriotism when caught in Florence in 1913.
Q 09Which French king acquired the Mona Lisa after Leonardo's death in 1519?
Francis I
Francis I, who had brought Leonardo to Amboise in 1516, bought the painting after the artist's death for 4,000 gold écus and kept it at Fontainebleau.
Q 10The Louvre Palace was originally built in the late 12th century as what?
A fortress
Philip II built the Louvre as a fortress around 1190 to guard Paris; Charles V turned it into a residence in the 1360s, and its medieval foundations are visible in the museum's basement.
Q 11The Metropolitan Museum of Art's main building sits on which New York thoroughfare?
Fifth Avenue
Its address on the "Museum Mile" is 1000 Fifth Avenue; The Cloisters, its medieval branch, is uptown in Fort Tryon Park.
Q 12What is the popular centerpiece of the Metropolitan Museum's Egyptian Art department?
The Temple of Dendur
The Temple of Dendur, a Roman-era Egyptian temple given by Egypt in 1965 after the Aswan dam rescue, was reassembled in the Met's glass-walled Sackler Wing in 1978.
Q 13Which British scientist left his fortune to the United States, giving the Smithsonian its name?
James Smithson
Q 21Which architect designed New York's spiral Guggenheim Museum, completed in 1959?
Frank Lloyd Wright
Frank Lloyd Wright received the commission in 1943 and the spiral opened in October 1959, six months after his death; artists protested that its sloping ramp would distort the hanging of paintings.
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 was dug up on the Esquiline on 14 January 1506; Pope Julius II sent Michelangelo to inspect it and bought it for the Belvedere courtyard, founding the collection.
Q 23Which room is deliberately the last one on the visitor route through the Vatican Museums?
James Smithson, an English chemist who never visited America, left about $500,000 in gold to the United States in his will to found an institution 'for the increase and diffusion of knowledge'.
Q 14Which Smithsonian museum houses the Hope Diamond?
National Museum of Natural History
The Hope Diamond, a 45.52-carat blue diamond donated by Harry Winston in 1958, sits in the National Museum of Natural History's gem hall on the National Mall.
Q 15Florence's Uffizi takes its name from the Italian word for what?
Offices
Uffizi means 'offices': Vasari began the complex in 1560 to house the administrative offices of Cosimo I de' Medici's government, and the galleries opened to visitors by the 1760s.
Q 16The Prado's most extensively represented artist is which Spanish painter?
Francisco Goya
Francisco Goya is the Prado's most extensively represented artist, with some 150 paintings plus hundreds of drawings and prints; the Madrid museum opened in November 1819 showing only Spanish painting.
Q 17Which empress founded the Hermitage Museum in 1764?
Catherine the Great
Catherine the Great began the Hermitage in 1764 by buying 225 paintings from the Berlin merchant Johann Ernst Gotzkowsky, a collection originally assembled for Frederick the Great of Prussia.
Q 18The Hermitage's main complex includes which former imperial residence?
The Winter Palace
The Winter Palace, the tsars' official residence from the 1760s until 1917, is the heart of the Hermitage complex; its baroque facade by Rastrelli faces Palace Square.
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 20Where in Midtown does New York's Museum of Modern Art stand?
53rd Street
MoMA has stood at 11 West 53rd Street in Midtown since its purpose-built Goodwin and Stone building opened there in 1939; the sculpture garden followed in 1953.
The Sistine Chapel
The Sistine Chapel is placed at the end of the route so visitors finish under Michelangelo's 1508–12 ceiling and his Last Judgment on the altar wall, completed in 1541.
Q 24The Musée d'Orsay in Paris occupies a former what?
Railway station
The Beaux-Arts Gare d'Orsay railway station was built for the 1900 Exposition Universelle; after its platforms proved too short, it closed to main-line trains in 1939 and reopened as a museum in 1986.
Q 25London's Tate Modern is housed in a converted what?
Power station
Bankside Power Station was designed by Giles Gilbert Scott, who also did Battersea Power Station; the Turbine Hall is its centrepiece.
Q 26Which architect designed London's Natural History Museum building, opened in 1881?
Alfred Waterhouse
Alfred Waterhouse clad the 1881 building in Romanesque terracotta, with carved animals on the facade; it houses some 80 million specimens across botany, entomology, mineralogy, palaeontology and zoology.
Q 27New York's natural history museum on Central Park West stands in a park named after which president?
Theodore Roosevelt
Theodore Roosevelt Park surrounds the museum; the president's father, Theodore Roosevelt Sr., was among its founders in 1869, and an equestrian statue of the president stood at the Central Park West entrance until 2022.
Q 28How many works were stolen from Boston's Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in 1990?
13
13 works, among them a Vermeer, three Rembrandts and a Manet, were taken in 81 minutes by two thieves dressed as police on 18 March 1990; the museum left the empty frames hanging.
Q 29Which Vermeer was taken in the 1990 Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum heist?
The Concert
Vermeer's The Concert, one of only around three dozen surviving works by him, has been valued at over $200 million; Rembrandt's only seascape, The Storm on the Sea of Galilee, vanished the same night.
Q 30Sue, the famous T. rex at Chicago's Field Museum, sold at auction in 1997 for roughly how much?
$8.3 million
Sue fetched $8.36 million — roughly $8.3 million — at Sotheby's in October 1997, then a record for a fossil; the skeleton had been dug up in South Dakota in 1990.