The barbarians enter the Louvre
Feb. 12th, 2011 10:38 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shewhomustThe last treat of our winter jaunt was a day in Paris; and since our return journey had run to schedule, we had a full day to play with. Mostly when we're in Paris, there are two must-visits: one is the big FNAC bookshop, the other is Jenny*. But I've been enjoying being a tourist in London, and I hadn't visited the Louvre museum since they built the Pyramid (that'd be 1989), so that's what we did. Jenny, as it happens, was taking a party round the Louvre that morning, so we met for breakfast and she showed us the quick way in, and we made a date for dinner, and set off.
Preliminary information: 1 - the Louvre was ridiculously, exceptionally busy; 2 -![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
durham_rambler was gradually going down with a form of the illness I'd had in Pusiano, and eventually bailed out, went back to the hotel and slept; 3 - photography is allowed in the Louvre. There are signs telling you not to use flash, but there's no problem with photography. Occasionally this is a pain (some of the Assyrian sculptures were permanently obscured by a string of young women whose boyfriends simply had to photograph them with a two-headed bull), and very few of the pictures I take come out well enough to share (Louvre photos here), but mostly it enables me to take notes and look things up afterwards.
You can, if you like, use a headset to tour the main highlights of the collection. As a result, there are little knots of visitors huddled around the designated masterpieces, while adjacent works are left quite alone. We didn't even try to see the Mona Lisa; but Vermeer's Lacemaker was surrounded by a crowd three deep, while next to her, we had his Astronomer to ourselves. I'd have liked a chance to look at the Lacemaker, but the Astronomer was rather splendid, too. These were exceptional, though: mostly there was gallery upon gallery of much less appealing stuff, like Ferdinand Bol's rather alarming family of children out for a ride in a golden coach pulled by two sawn-off goats, or the still life of an orgy of fish hanging over the staircase - brilliantly done, no doubt, but not something I'd want to live with. I liked this study of three ostriches by Pieter Boel, a seventeenth century artist who - I now learn - had the task of painting Louis XIV's menagerie; but I suspect what I liked about it was that it was a study, and would have been lost in a finished painting.
There were some other good things, too: a Durer self-portrait, a Holbein portrait of Erasmus - and then there was the Medieval gallery.
This was just amazing, such a variety of beautiful things, from an eartherware tile with a rabbit motif to the extremes of medieval bling - no, not the sceptre, that's comparatively restrained, I just like the way my hands are visible to either side of it. For serious overkill, have a look at Saint Louis's chess set, decoration within decoration, crystal and quartz and silver. I had to rest my dazzled eyes on a tapestry of a dancing bear, or a little Scandinavian bronze or...
That was the high point of my visit. I wandered through the galleries, past the winged lions and the Stele of Hammurabi, and sculptures from places I'd never even heard of, got lost, failed to find the blue hippopotamus, went round in circles, couldn't even find the postcard shop (though I didn't realise at the time that this was neither the gift shop nor the bookshop but somewhere else) and admitted defeat.
Refreshed by a cup of tea and a muffin, I walked a couple of stops towards the hotel before catching the metro the rest of the way. I was tempted to veer of and visit FNAC, but felt guilty, too, about abanding the invalid, so I didn't, and was quite glad of a short rest before we went out in the evening to dinner with Jenny.
*I try not to throw other people's names around this LJ, so Jenny has hitherto appeared as a noncommittal initial. But since she is a qualified city guide, and if you go to Paris you might be lucky enough to meet her, it makes more sense to introduce Jennifer Burdon. (I don't know what's wrong with that link...)
Preliminary information: 1 - the Louvre was ridiculously, exceptionally busy; 2 -
durham_rambler was gradually going down with a form of the illness I'd had in Pusiano, and eventually bailed out, went back to the hotel and slept; 3 - photography is allowed in the Louvre. There are signs telling you not to use flash, but there's no problem with photography. Occasionally this is a pain (some of the Assyrian sculptures were permanently obscured by a string of young women whose boyfriends simply had to photograph them with a two-headed bull), and very few of the pictures I take come out well enough to share (Louvre photos here), but mostly it enables me to take notes and look things up afterwards.You can, if you like, use a headset to tour the main highlights of the collection. As a result, there are little knots of visitors huddled around the designated masterpieces, while adjacent works are left quite alone. We didn't even try to see the Mona Lisa; but Vermeer's Lacemaker was surrounded by a crowd three deep, while next to her, we had his Astronomer to ourselves. I'd have liked a chance to look at the Lacemaker, but the Astronomer was rather splendid, too. These were exceptional, though: mostly there was gallery upon gallery of much less appealing stuff, like Ferdinand Bol's rather alarming family of children out for a ride in a golden coach pulled by two sawn-off goats, or the still life of an orgy of fish hanging over the staircase - brilliantly done, no doubt, but not something I'd want to live with. I liked this study of three ostriches by Pieter Boel, a seventeenth century artist who - I now learn - had the task of painting Louis XIV's menagerie; but I suspect what I liked about it was that it was a study, and would have been lost in a finished painting.
There were some other good things, too: a Durer self-portrait, a Holbein portrait of Erasmus - and then there was the Medieval gallery.
This was just amazing, such a variety of beautiful things, from an eartherware tile with a rabbit motif to the extremes of medieval bling - no, not the sceptre, that's comparatively restrained, I just like the way my hands are visible to either side of it. For serious overkill, have a look at Saint Louis's chess set, decoration within decoration, crystal and quartz and silver. I had to rest my dazzled eyes on a tapestry of a dancing bear, or a little Scandinavian bronze or...That was the high point of my visit. I wandered through the galleries, past the winged lions and the Stele of Hammurabi, and sculptures from places I'd never even heard of, got lost, failed to find the blue hippopotamus, went round in circles, couldn't even find the postcard shop (though I didn't realise at the time that this was neither the gift shop nor the bookshop but somewhere else) and admitted defeat.
Refreshed by a cup of tea and a muffin, I walked a couple of stops towards the hotel before catching the metro the rest of the way. I was tempted to veer of and visit FNAC, but felt guilty, too, about abanding the invalid, so I didn't, and was quite glad of a short rest before we went out in the evening to dinner with Jenny.
*I try not to throw other people's names around this LJ, so Jenny has hitherto appeared as a noncommittal initial. But since she is a qualified city guide, and if you go to Paris you might be lucky enough to meet her, it makes more sense to introduce Jennifer Burdon. (I don't know what's wrong with that link...)
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