Louvre attracts record number of visits in 2018

The world's most popular museum, the Paris Louvre, received over 10 million visitors in 2018, a record which it partly attributed Thursday to a Beyonce video shot against the backdrop of the Mona Lisa and other famous works, the Local reports.

Some 10.2 million people visited the museum last year, a 25 percent increase over 2017, which its president Jean-Luc Martinez also linked to a stunning tourism recovery in Paris after a slump caused by a spate of terror attacks.

But Martinez also gave some of the credit to pop power couple Beyonce and Jay Z, who shot the video for their hit "Apeshit" in the galleries of the former royal palace.

The wildly popular clip, which has been viewed 147 million times on YouTube, went on to form the basis of a tour designed by the Louvre that takes in the 17 paintings and sculptures featured in the video (see below).