Feb. 25 (Bloomberg) -- Older art beat newer art for bragging rights as Paris's Louvre, home to the ``Mona Lisa,'' drew more visitors last year than its local contemporary-art rival, the Centre Pompidou, according to an Art Newspaper survey.

The Louvre led all museums worldwide with 8.3 million visitors in 2007. The Centre Pompidou attracted 5.5 million visits, putting it in second place on a list of the best-attended museums compiled by the London-based paper for its March issue.

Tate Modern on the Thames in London counted 5.2 million entrants, followed by the British Museum, with 4.8 million, and New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art, with 4.5 million, the paper said.

This is the Art Newspaper's first survey of attendance. By asking museums to count visitors for the calendar year, it offers a better comparison than was available previously. Museums' own attendance reports reflect varying time frames.

The survey doesn't, however, distinguish between museums that charge for admission and those that don't. It also doesn't include any information on museums' revenue from attendance and shows.

The Art Newspaper also has tracked the top exhibitions for about 12 years. The Tokyo National Museum, No. 17 in attendance, staged 2007's most popular exhibition, ``The Mind of Leonardo.'' Leonardo da Vinci's ``Annunciation,'' a 15th-century painting of the angel Gabriel and the Virgin Mary, was viewed by 10,071 visitors a day while it was on loan from Florence's Uffizi from March 20 to June 17.

Italians who protested the loan because the trip might have harmed the painting, ``served to fuel the publicity machine'' that helped to draw crowds, the paper said.

No. 2 Monet

The National Art Center in Tokyo had the No. 2 show, ``Monet's Art and Its Posterity.'' The museum counted 9,273 visitors a day for the exhibition, which ran April 7 to July 2.

``Masterpieces of French Paintings from the Met'' and ``Tutankhamun and the Golden Age of the Pharoahs'' appeared twice each on the list of the 15 most popular exhibitions.

The Met said its new Greek and Roman galleries have had one million visitors in the 10 months since they opened, or about 3,700 visitors a day.

The number of visitors isn't necessarily the best measure of a museum's success.

``The quality of a museum's collections, exhibition program, educational offerings, publications and staff are the best measures,'' said Elyse Topalian, a Met spokeswoman, in an e-mail.

The Met had about five million visitors a year until the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, she said.

To contact the reporter on this story: Linda Sandler in New York at lsandler@bloomberg.net.

Last Updated: February 25, 2008 12:33 EST