Today was the Louvre

Unfortunately Penny had to wake me up this morning. It was 9 am and I was still sound asleep. So much for getting early starts. I think we got out of the house around 10:30 and had cafe au lait and croissants/brioche/pain aux raisins at the neighborhood boulangerie/patisserie: Miss Manon. Fernando was shocked to be billed 20 euros, especially since we had paid 15 euros for our dinner of falafels the night before. So I think he will be satisfied with coffee and croissants at home from now on.

Then we started walking down the Rue Saint Antoine to the Louvre, passing shops where I wasn't able to stop, except for one Spanish store Zara. Here's the gmap pedometer map of where we went, where the walk was 5.13 miles, not counting the Louvre.

When we got to the Louvre there was a long line towards the pyramid with a guard holding a sign saying that from that point it was a 1 hour wait. He was also asking people if they spoke French and if so he told them they could go to a different entrance. So we followed the French speakers to the Carousel du Louvre, which is a shopping center connected to the Louvre where there really wasn't a line at all. But first we needed to find a bathroom, les toilettes, but couldn't find one anywhere. Finally a woman showed us to a swanky pay toilet with colored toilet paper for 1 euro. Kind of steep but we were desperate. (Later we found there were free toilettes inside the Louvre.)

We spent a couple of hours in the Italian and French section of the Louvre - saw the Mona Lisa and works by David, Ingres and Delacroix. And we saw lots and lots of people, old and young. I think we took plenty of photos so you can see some of what we saw. By then it must have been 2:30 so we decided to eat in the mall's food court. Penny and I split a dish of roast lamb, carrots and ratatouille (Fernando had his own). It would be nice if American malls had equally good fast food.

Then we came back out of the Louvre, walked over towards Rue Montorgueil and tested out one of the automatic toilettes in the street. It was quite satisfactory except for the hand dryer and the amount of time one had to wait for the toilette to disinfect itself between users.

We visited the cookware store E. Dehillerin and almost bought that big stock pot that Camila needed. Then we went into the food store G. DeTout but didn't buy anything except a few chocolate bars. I'd like to buy some Kushti tea because the tins are so pretty but it is rather expensive.

We had the best time on rue Montorgueil, going into the produce markets where we bought strawberrries, a cucumber, heart-shaped red potatoes, and purple artichokes. Fernando picked up some boudin noir (blood sausage) and head cheese at a boucherie and finally we picked up two kinds of cheese at a fromagerie. This was our dinner. It was about 2 miles from there home and we still had to pick up some wine and bread for dinner and milk for breakfast so we stopped at our neighborhood monoprix, which is a supermarket just a block away.

Tomorrow we might pick up a roast chicken for dinner -- or maybe we should make an omelet with these huge champignons we bought the first day. Then we'll boil our artichokes and undoubtedly find even more food that we can't resist. I better check when the markets are. Maybe Penny and I can run out tomorrow morning to the Bastille market...

Louvre

The Louvre, the largest museum in the western world fills 3 wings of this immense, U-shaped royal palace which was built in stages over eight centuries.  With more than 30,000 works of art, the Louvre is a full inventory of Western civilization.  Its specialties are Greek sculpture, Italian painting, and French painting.  Its stars are the Venus de Milo, Winged Victory, Mona Lisa, Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael, Michelangelo, the French painters and many of the iconic images of Western art.

Now I know that I’m good for about two hours in an art museum which is why I love the Metropolitan Museum in NYC.  I can pay what I will, see what I want and come back another day.  And I don’t think my travel companions will have any greater museum attention span than I.

So here in a nut shell are the highlights.  And after this tour, perhaps we won’t have to figure out how to fit it all in and we'll have additional time to compare grocery and department stores.  I propose we take a look at the images I have painstakingly collected and move on to the Orsay, although I have to admit I'm quite taken with the I.M. Pei Pyramid. 

Classical World

Winged Victory of Samotrace.  c. 190 B.C. 

Venus de Milo, c. 100 B.C.from the island of Melos  

Notice the "balance and orderliness of the Greek universe."

Medieval

Cimabue - The Madonna of the Angels (1280)

During the Age of Faith (1200s) almost every church in Europe has a painting like this one.  Mary was a cult figure.  Altarpieces tended to follow the same formula:  somber iconic faces, still poses, elegant fold in the robes and generic angels. 

Giotto - St. Francis Receiving the Stigmata (c.1290-1295) 

Italian Renaissance

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Leonardo da Vinci - Virgin, Child and St. Anne, c. 1510

"Three generations - grandmother, mother, and child - are arranged ina pyramid, with Anne's face as the peak and the lamb as the lower right corner.  The Louvre has the greatest collection of Leonardos in the world (and that's five)"

Mona Lisa (1503-1506) Yes, this is what you'll see!

Michelangelo - Slaves (1513-1515)

French Neoclassicism (1780-1850)

David - The Coronation of Napoleon (1806-107)

Ingres - La Grande Odalisque (1819)