The Louvre

Since I last wrote I have, as you may have surmised from the title of this post, been to the Louvre. I feel like I should have more to say about it, given how I much I enthused in my post about the Musée d'Orsay, but I have to admit, I liked the Musée d'Orsay better.

Don't get me wrong, the Louvre is amazingly impressive. Another au pair and I went together - oh wait, we actually went before my last posting. Oops. Anyway, we went on the 5th, because pretty much all the museums in Paris are free on the first Sunday of the month. I love being here, but sometimes being an au pair is like being in college again, ie I have no money.

Now you may be thinking, Oh my, Susanna, you went to the world's most visited art museum, the one that houses one of the most famous paintings in the world, on a day when everyone and their brother-in-law was going to be there? On an average day there are 12,000 visitors, and many more on a day like that! What were you thinking?

This is a valid question. Mostly we were thinking, "Score! Free museum!" but I should also remind you that the Louvre is 652,300 square feet. That is very, very large. And as an aside, thank you google, for helpfully providing information about the size of the museum and average numbers of visitors. So yes, there were thousands of people there but, frankly, if you weren't in the section with the Mona Lisa or some of the Greek antiquities, it wasn't that crowded. We were in this massive line to get in, but it moved at practically a walking place - you just can't fill the building up.

Which leads me to why I like it less than the Musée d'Orsay. The Louvre is unbelievably, ridiculously, overwhelmingly impressive. We visited several exhibits (Ancient Mesopotamia, Ancient Egypt, Ancient Greece, Ancient Near East, and Dutch and Flemish paintings. We visited, maybe, 1/4 of the museum. We were there about 5 hours. The place never ends. In the Dutch and Flemish collection there are rooms upon rooms of paintings, each wall covered in them, and you keep walking through them, in awe of the beauty and artistry and history until you can't even take it in anymore. And then there's the architecture and decoration of the building itself. After all, it was palace before it was a museum and the rooms, and the view of Paris from some of the windows, are breathtaking. But the weight of all that history and beauty and the sheer size of the place is a little suffocating.

I think if I was going to be in Paris for a long amount of time (and really, I would need a couple years for this) I would go on the first Sunday of each month, just for a couple hours, and visit only one exhibit, taking my time. I know I'm here about a year, but there are other museums I want to go to, so that isn't feasible now; I have to visit more than one exhibit each time I go.

I do plan to go back, though. I want to see the African art, as well as the Napoleon rooms, and I'd really like to see the French art as well. For now, here are a couple pictures I took. I only took a few because I quickly realized that if I kept going I'd never be able to stop, but you can see a few things:

My friend is there for a size comparison. I was so excited to see these, because we'd studied them in art history. Which reminds me: I HAVE SEEN HAMMURABI'S CODE. Just saying.

This was another favorite thing. The random person in the corner is for scale. This is the top (the top 1/5, maybe) of a column from the palace of one the Persian kings. There were 36 columns in his throne room, each topped by one of these. That's some serious impressive, people.

And these are views from one of windows. Not too good, as pictures go, but I loved being able to look out at Paris. If you look very, very closely at the first you can see La Defense and the Arc de Triomphe. The second features, obviously, the Eiffel Tower, but very sneakily also has the Grand Palais. Probably no one can see it, but I swear it was clearer when you were actually looking at it, not trying to photograph it through a window.

Other favorite things I saw that I did not photograph: the statue of Cupid and Psyche, paintings by Vermeer and Jan Steen, the huge room lined with absolutely massive Rubens that illustrate the life of Queen Marie de Médicis, and, of course, Hammurabi's Code. Also, lots of truly beautiful gold jewelry (and I got to see some rings like the one I patterned the Egyptian ring in my honors project on!). But while I loved some of the art I got to see, the Musée d'Orsay reigns supreme in my art museum affections. Sorry Louvre!