Thursday in Paris was devoted to two biggies, in different ways, the first absolute and the other relative to us: first, the Louvre, the biggest art museum in the world (perhaps you've heard of it?); and second, the Cinémathique, a city-of-Paris museum devoted to the history of film and so housing splendid collections of materials from early camerae obscurae through costumes and costume designs to weird rare prints--and a mouth-wateringly, mind-bendingly good bookstore de cinéma. More on that, and on my ... fairly many Parisian book-purchases overall, later.
First, biggest, le Louvre, nearly 650,000 square feet of space for permanent collections of some 35,000 works of art. How to stare down such a thing?
Grâce à nôtres Museum Passes, we got in quickly and found ourselves amidst ... near-total silence, in the galleries devoted to ancient Egyptian and ancient Near Eastern materials. Apparently, and happily, the more ordinary approach to the Museum starts elsewhere! As we wended our way around the long arc from northern to eastern and thence to southern sides, we met more crowds and--no exaggeration--marveled as much at the space, the building itself, as at the artworks it contains. Here are several views of the Museum from within the Museum, a mise-en-abyme that opened up only gorgeous vistas:
Just look at the bright wintry shadows on the stone! At lower left is the truly grand hall / stairwell featuring, alone, the famous 'Winged Victory' or Nike of Samothrace; here she is closer up, showing detail of feathers on wing:
Imagine, we (I) shouted, being able to make stone look soft! Of course the Nike is far from the only such example; here are several others that stood out in the Greek and Roman collections, especially the astonishing three-dimensional relief we both love:
River god, and then several aspects of the famous mythic battle between the Centaurs and the Lapiths. Proportion is so crucial and breathtaking; here are some images of Jenny interacting with works of art to show the interplay of detail and scale:
... and showing as well an oddity: nobody--literally nobody--was looking at the painting, Ingres' Grande Odalisque, a breathtaking shift from Neo-classicism towards Romanticism, with yet a sort of Neo-classicizing attention to fabric: just look at the folds! (A bonus upon seeing beloved art face-to-face: getting to see as well the material aging, as per cracks in the canvas.)
Trooping on with much consultation with guards (a reduced staff, given la grève, meaning some closed galleries and odd elevator blockages), we sought out two final pieces in particular, favorites of mine which I'd be damned if I left the Louvre without seeing--an adventure which Jenny graciously endured despite a bit of sickness coming on. Of similar painterly intensity, Magdalena Bay:
And of similar Romanticism with Classics in its background, Canova's depiction of the moment in Apuleius' story of 'Cupid & Psyche' where he rouses her with a kiss:
That combination was a special pleasure for me: I teach Apuleius' story frequently and I've written about its effect on Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, whose frame-narrative is of course set in the icy Arctic threatening shipwreck ...
Out of sequence, but a final classical-reception note: Louis XIV's 'Apollo Room,' containing the royal jewels and whose ceiling depicts the cycle of the zodiac in, as Jenny well put it, just *offensive* opulence, as good a single indication of what's going on with the Louvre as any:
And so we wrapped up our time at the first museum of the day, a bit slow-walking-weary and ready to change locations for our next scene, the Cinématheque!
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