2 visitors to the Musée Calvet in a room full of paintings - Photo credit: Olivier Tresson / Avignon Tourisme2 visitors to the Musée Calvet in a room full of paintings - Photo credit: Olivier Tresson / Avignon Tourisme
©2 visitors to the Musée Calvet in a room full of paintings - Photo credit: Olivier Tresson / Avignon Tourisme|Olivier Tresson / Avignon Tourisme

Requien, Lapidaire, Calvet... Avignon's top free museums

Unique collections

Five museums (Calvet, Lapidaire, Petit Palais, Requien, Palais du Roure) complement each other and offer thousands of works of art – objects, documents, paintings and sculptures – in Avignon’s finest buildings. And what’s more, it’s free for all!

The Lapidary Museum

The Musée Lapidaire or Galerie des Antiques of the Musée Calvet presents Greek, Roman, Gallo-Roman and Paleo-Christian collections, in a gradually renewed presentation.

The Requien Museum

The Museum Requien owes its name to its creator, Esprit Requien (1788 – 1851), who bequeathed his collections and library to the Musée Calvet in 1840. With over 1.2 million specimens, it is one of the most important natural history museums in the region. It regularly presents exhibitions, and also houses a large study library and reserves accessible only to researchers.

The Petit Palais Museum

The Musée du Petit Palais is one of Europe’s leading museums of medieval art. It is classified as a Musée de France and a UNESCO World Heritage Site. The museum houses a unique collection of paintings from the Middle Ages and the Italian Renaissance (over three hundred Italian primitives), including the Campana collection, a major collection from the Musée Calvet (Ecole d’Avignon from the 13th to the 16th c.) and medieval sculptures from the 12th to the 16th c. from Avignon and the surrounding area.

The Palais du Roure

This center of Provençal culture bears witness to the history of a great Avignon family and to an architecture that has been constantly remodeled since the 15th century. Now a center of Mediterranean culture, it is dedicated to Provence, its history, traditions, language and literature, and features an important collection of bells assembled by Jeanne de Flandreysy.

The Calvet Museum

The building and the collection together form one of Avignon’s most poetic and historically charged sites. The Ecole d’Avignon is celebrated here, with a panorama of Avignon’s artistic creation from the Renaissance to the Revolution. Paintings, sculptures and objets d’art reveal the richness of this 16th-17th-century production, with works by Simon de Châlons, Nicolas Mignard, Reynaud Levieux and Pierre Mignard, as well as works from the 17th and early 18th centuries.

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