I Can Only Get This Wrong So Many Times: Day 9

Story time. (Isn’t that literally the entire blog? Shaddup.) On our second trip to Paris we were there with friends. (Hi, Ryanses!) We all had a pretty similar list of must-sees, with the usual suspects of museums, scenic walks and so on. I had somehow been the one to suggest an itinerary to maximize the use of our precious time in the City of Lights and, being a group of my wife and some of our dearest friends, they readily accepted my suggestions. And it was great, really. Perhaps my favorite traveling story ever happened that week, and really it was fun all around. The last day of our stay was Tuesday, and we had saved the best for last : musée du Louvre. (Some of you are snickering already; well, no extra credit for getting to the end early. :P) European art’s crown jewel. Famous in a hundred different ways. One of the top tourist destinations in the entire world.

And also? Yeah, closed on Tuesdays.

Unsurprisingly I’ve never lived that story down, although it’s the gentle good-natured ribbing (I think? I hope?) between friends who have been through it all. That said, we have spent more time than is probably healthy talking about all the different ways we would dissect and consume every square inch of that (#*&@^#@ museum when we got our chance. Day 9 was our chance.

Having spent more approximately the same amount of time planning the Louvre as we did on our wedding, we were prepped. We don’t have a room-by-room plan, more like an overall strategy. The trick is not to do too much of the museum at once. It’s an overwhelming (literal) palace of art, and if you have any notion of actually taking in what you’re seeing you can’t do it at all at once. Or at least, we can’t. So our plan is to either a) have a nice meal and then spend the afternoon there, or b) spend the morning until whenever we’re hungry and then break for a meal. On a “b” day, we allow for the possibility that after having a nibble we might go back for a little bit more.

For this first day, we decided to start with a special exhibition they were hosting, “Paris & Athens”, which explored (via the visual arts, natch) the rise of the modern Greek state. It was really fascinating; the pieces of art weren’t “famous” but they were amazing. In particular we loved these absolutely gigantic drawings of sites like Delphi, meticulously depicting the site as it was at the time so that it could be displayed at a massive exhibition in Paris at the turn of the century. In a somewhat common practice, especially before the ubiquity of photography, these enormous depictions would be done for numerous locations and then sent on tour, they being the closest most people across the world would ever get to seeing them at all. The Delphi piece in particular was fascinating because it was paired with an identically sized work, by the same artist, where they took their own liberty to depict what the site might have looked like “back in the day”.

After the Paris-Athens exhibit we paused for lunch. This is a good time to break and examine why, exactly, we chose to make this trip in January; I mean, there are some fabulous gardens in Paris but they’re basically dirt tracks in the winter. Yes, but – there was literally no line to enter the Louvre when we arrived at 10AM. When we paused for lunch we went into one of the on-site cafes, where it was… enh, call it 1/4 full. No, the building isn’t empty, per se, but we still felt like we had the run of the place. It’s pretty great. As for the meal itself, I don’t think Lisa posted a review of this meal in particular, but she talks about museum food in general and this place fell right in line with her thoughts on the subject. In other words, “enh.”

After lunch, we began our exploration of the museum in earnest. Our plan in a nutshell: Go to one of the numbered galleries in any wing, and then wend our way through whatever that section is. In a perfect world we would finish a given section (say, French painting to the 1850s) in a day. In other words:

According to the map above, we would attempt to get through the fuchsia part of the Sully wing of the museum. If that doesn’t seem like a lot… well, those corridors are wide enough to hold two rooms side by side that are maybe 25 feet across, so you’re weaving your way through, in the example above, maybe 20 rooms. Each of which is wall-to-wall exemplar pieces of the represented era, region, and style. Believe me when I say it is a lot. When we were younger we’d talk about getting in to the museum early, doing a wing like that, then breaking for lunch, and then doing another one, but we know now that this is a recipe for burnout.

So, how was it? I mean…. it’s the Louvre. It really is informational overload to try and describe everything in detail. The highlight of the day, however, was the series of monumental propaganda pieces created by Peter Paul Reubens at the behest of Catherine, Queen of France, née Catherine de’ Medici.

They tell the tale of her life from the presentation of her portrait to Henry II of France (he swiped right, it seems), to her ascension to Queen at the cough pleadings of her court, to the untimely cough death of Henry the day after she was crowned, and on to the estrangement and reconciliation between her and her son. It’s a hell of a story, or actually hell of two stories: the truth, and what Catherine wanted told. And also, smarter people than me say that the series had a profound effect on the course of art in Europe. So that’s nice. Whatever other qualities these paintings have, they are huge. 6 or 7 feet tall (I’m guessing, I’m sure the information is out there but a quick search failed me and I’m sleeeeeepy at the moment), and altogether they take up a massive gallery all by themselves. It’s the kind of room you can spend an hour or more in, walking a few steps and then sitting on the next bench and staring; one, after the other.

A couple of hours of intensive northern European painting and we were, in fact, done for the day. 2 halls worth of art were a good start, and we could continue to look forward to future visits. We scooted home in a taxi and collapsed into another quiet night. The next day beckoned with *another* of the icons of Paris: the Musée d’Orsay. Oh, and John nearly has a nervous breakdown that day. Fun!