Editing Culture of France (section)

===Art and museums===
{{Main|French art}}
[[File:Louvre Museum Wikimedia Commons.jpg|thumb|upright=1.3|[[Musée du Louvre]], Paris]]

The first paintings of France are those that are from prehistoric times, painted in the caves of [[Lascaux]] well over 10,000 years ago. The arts were already flourishing 1,200 years ago, at the time of [[Charlemagne]], as can be seen in many hand made and hand illustrated books of that time.

[[Gothic art]] and architecture originated in France in the 12th century around Paris and then spread to all of Europe. In the 13th century, French craftsmen developed the stained glass painting technique and sophisticated illuminated manuscripts for private devotion in the new gothic style. The final phase of gothic architecture, known as Flamboyant, also began in France in the 15th century before spreading to the rest of Europe.

The 17th century was one of intense artistic achievements: French painting emerged with a distinct identity, moving from Baroque to Classicism. Famous classic painters of the 17th century in France are [[Nicolas Poussin]] and [[Claude Lorrain]]. French architecture also proved influential with the Palace of Versailles, built for the powerful king Louis XIV, becoming the model of many European royal palaces. During the 18th century the [[Rococo]] style emerged as a frivolous continuation of the [[Baroque]] style. The most famous painters of the era were [[Antoine Watteau]], [[François Boucher]] and [[Jean-Honoré Fragonard]]. At the end of the century, [[Jacques-Louis David]] and [[Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres|Dominique Ingres]] were the most influential painters of the [[Neoclassicism]].

[[Théodore Géricault|Géricault]] and [[Eugène Delacroix|Delacroix]] were the most important painters of the [[Romanticism]]. Afterwards, the painters were more realistic, describing nature (Barbizon school). The [[Realism (arts)|realistic movement]] was led by [[Gustave Courbet|Courbet]] and [[Honoré Daumier]]. Impressionism was developed in France by artists such as [[Claude Monet]], [[Edgar Degas]], [[Pierre-Auguste Renoir]] and [[Camille Pissarro]]. At the turn of the century, France had become more than ever the center of innovative art. The Spaniard [[Pablo Picasso]] came to France, like many other foreign artists, to deploy his talents there for decades to come. [[Toulouse-Lautrec]], [[Gauguin]] and [[Cézanne]] were painting then. [[Cubism]] is an [[avant-garde]] movement born in Paris at the beginning of the 20th century.

The [[Louvre]] in Paris is one of the most famous and the largest art museums in the world, created by the new revolutionary regime in 1793 in the former royal palace. It holds a vast amount of art of French and other artists, e.g. the [[Mona Lisa]], by [[Leonardo da Vinci]], and classical Greek [[Venus de Milo]] and ancient works of culture and art from Egypt and the Middle East.