Day Four Part 2-The Louvre

I felt the Louvre Museum deserved its own little section. Everything I had heard about the Louvre is true--it's absolutely stunning, it's overwhelming, and yes, you will get lost(notice I didn't say "if" you get lost). However, what better place to become lost than in a former palace filled with 30,000 works of art---not including the buildings themselves. The Louvre covers the period from ancient times through 1850. The D'Orsay Museum takes it from 1850-1914 including the Impressionists, while the Pompidou Center covers the 20th century through today. This is all background info. I gathered from the many guidebooks I poured over before the trip. We did these 3 wonderful places a little out of order, but the Louvre topped them all for us. The buildings that make up the Louvre are in a horseshoe shape with the beautiful Tuileries Gardens in the open part of the horseshoe. I didn't get pics of the gardens as we spent most of the time inside, but again, save that for another trip back.
Here's one of the few pics of the outside that is actually taken from the D'Orsay museum across the Seine:




With the release of The DaVinci Code movie, the Louvre had its spotlight on film. We watched TDCode on the flight back from Paris and it was fun seeing the places in the Louvre used for filming that we had visited. I took a lot of pics in the Louvre of various works, too many to post here, so I'll just post some highlights.

We were told that we could avoid long lines by entering the Louvre from the underground Metro stop, so that's where we started. Remembe the inverted pyramids in TDVCode? Here it is and I almost caught it without a "body" in it, but not quite!





While many high-tailed it to the Mona Lisa, we decided to follow the "tour" in our guidebook that hit the "must sees", so we took our time. We started in the Ancient Greece area(that's part of the 6th grade curriculum), so I was interested in this section. We then came to our first main piece, the Venus de Milo:







We traveled through some ancient Roman sculptures and then came upon an impressive figure, The Winged Victory of Samothrace(this is TDVCode). I took several pics of this one as the view all around was impressive:













While making our way to Mona, we enjoyed the wonderful ceiling murals that decorate much of the museum, most left over from when the buildings were palaces. Here's a view out the window of the courtyard of the famous pyramid structure:

Click-click






We took a little side trip to see the various jewel encrusted dishes, etc. used by the monarch. Sadly, the crown wore by King Henry was out on loan. My pics on these didn't turn out as well as I liked since everything was behind glass and it was rather dark in this room. So, we continued on to some Medievel Paintings,many focused on Christian paintings, but the faces are all so serious:






Finally, we reached The Grand Gallery(again in TDVCode) which featured the Italian Rennaisance Paintings. Here's where all those people I studied in Art History finally came to life! I won't post all that I took pics of, but of course, here's the best shot of the Mona Lisa I could get:


The room that Mona is in is filled with some great paintings--this pic just shows the size of the paintings on one wall:




The most impressive painting in this room for us was The Marriage at Cana by Veronese. Why? It fills an entire wall from floor to ceiling and there's so much to look at in the painting. This pics gives you an idea of how large the painting is by the people standing looking at it:





A few details of this huge painting.
I loved the animals in the painting, especially the little dog on the groom's lap staring down the large dog sitting by the groom:





The musicians in this one are Veronese and his friend, another artist, Titien.Jesus doesn't look quite thrilled with whole reception though.





Here's another animal pic---a cat wrestling with a lion's face on this vase:




I used a guidebook by Rick Steves for our Louvre tour. He does put his own bits of humor in his descriptions. As we went out of the Grand Gallery, he stated in his book to look for the painting "Death of Walter Mondale" OK, I remember Walter Mondale and I didn't think he would be old enough to have a painting in the Louvre, but, here you go:




For comparison--current pic of WMondale:





Leaving the Louvre, you go back underground and go up an escalator to the outside courtyard---you're actually inside the large glass pyramid on the way out.







We went across the street to a nice cafe for dinner and decided we would come back to the Louvre early Thursday morning to finish up some pieces we didn't see from the French artists.