Us in front of the architecturally significant pyramid out in 'front' of the museum.
We had the Paris museum pass which meant we got to go in a special (secret!) entrance and didn’t have to buy tickets, and since we were up so early we were literally one of the first people in the museum. So, of course, we went to see the A #1 most famous painting in the world. The Mona Lisa.
So beautiful! So mysterious! And the painting isn't bad either.
It’s...tiny. Really small, and they don’t let you get that close to it. I was more curious about how you actually go about showing the most famous painting in the world. Turns out: behind glass, on a big stone wall. It was kind of neat to see it while the hall was empty, like this was some new painting no one had heard of yet and we were totally into it before it got all ‘popular’.
Near Ms. Lisa, I was introduced to a class of paintings I didn’t realized existed: BIG ONES. Massive, wall-sized murals a good 7 or 10 meters high, and still incredibly detailed. I can’t imagine how you paint something like that. The coronation of Napoleon was the iconic example. BIG.
From here, I’m going to have to resort to bullet points. There was a lot of Louvre.
-Egyptian Antiquities. Pretty neat, but less ‘wow’.
-Crown Jewels (at least *someone’s* crown jewels. I forgot who.) Very pretty, and displayed in a massively detailed hall.
-A bevy of statues. Venus De Milo being the most famous. We would see a lot of these over the trip, and while this wasn’t the most impressive collection, it certainly made a good first pass.
Its ART, okay?
-They had a display downstairs about the history of the Louvre, and even where they had excavated the original moat. They had models of the development of the Louvre and the city around it that were both educational and impressive.
-A huge stone sphinx. Well, not as big as THE sphinx, but all out of stone, and clearly they had to move it all the way to France.
-Reuben Gallery. A collection of masterworks. Little detail in english, so the history was somewhat lost on me, but they were big, very pretty, and done by Reuben! He’s so famous he has an adjective named after him. (Reubenesque).
Jess catching some rest with the Reubens.
-The Napoleon apartments: Ostentatious! Made me want to hire an army of internal decorators for our own house. Course, we have the Playstation, so there’s that.
Who is your interior decorator?
-More paintings
-More statues
-Holy mackerel this museum goes on forever. There’s little way to describe it. I guess you just have to go and see.
We stayed at the Louvre for 7 hours until we got a little worn down by the classical stuff and when wandered down the street to the l’Musee d’Orsay. Orsay Museum. The Louvre holds all the stuff before the mid 1800’s and the Orsay everything after. So modernism! Back to bullet lists!
-We got to see THE portait of Van Gogh.
-Statues by Rodan (not the Thinker, but they did have a version of The Portal to Hell, which is really neat to look at)
-A big polar bear in marble
-One of my my favorite painting was (translated)
Knight of the flowers by Georges Antoine Rochegrosse. We also used all this art-viewing to think of paintings we might want to get (in reproduction obviously) for our house. This might go in my studio someday.
-Jess got really tired, but she still let me see the second floor because I was super interested and she’s nice to me.
Unfortunately, no pictures were allowed so you’ll have to use your imagination, but trust me, it was cool. After that, the Museum began to shut down, so we took the metro back to our Neighborhood and had dinner at one of many very, very similar French Restaurants that dotted the street with outdoor seating. It was a really nice dinner. Someone drove by in a pink Limo while we were eating.
So delicious, you'll eat the glass.
We took a break to head back to the hotel to relax and write in the journals that are forming the basis for all of this writing, and then when it got dark we went out to see l’Tour again, all lit up at night. It was really pretty, and a bunch of the street vendors that had been selling the knockoff Eiffel Tower souvenirs earlier in the day had come back and were selling these cool flying light-up toys. Jess bought a couple, kinda-sorta-negotiating the seller from 15 euro for two, down to 7 euro for two, mostly by just not wanting to buy it until it got cheaper.
That's a lot of iron!
At 11:00, the tower put on a show: a thousand strobes all over the tower, flashing on and off. Quite a sight to see. But after that, Jess finished off her enormous cotton candy and we went back to the hotel to sleep. Unfortunately, Jetlag caught up with us a bit at that point and we both woke up at 2 AM and couldn’t get back to sleep. So we just cuddled each other instead. Very relaxing.
-N
1 comment:
So, I'm slow. Napolean lived in the Louvre?? Just cut in some grotesquely ornate digs for himself and had his pick of loaner art work?? If I get famous soon, I'm getting a condo at the Smithsonian...Dad
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