Journée au Musée du Louvre

Blue sky at the Louvre

It is difficult, even for a committed franco-skeptic like my beastly self, to ignore the wattage of the space-time continuum that is the Musée du Louvre. The first Sunday of every month it is free, like so many Paris museums (http://hubpages.com/hub/Whats-Free-in-Paris --my nom de plume being Victoire). Though I've already been some 40 or 50 times, again we went.  A sunny sharp breeze blew us along the bright rive droite, teeming with German tourists on this first day of blue sky.

But first, the Guardians of the Palace. At the Pont des Arts are the guardians of the children of Africa. Black men beseech you with clipboards of xeroxed sheets to sign in support of African children, and ask for a donation. When Jacques asks if they have a permit, they produce an ancient xeroxed sheet of an actual NGO serving Cote d'Ivoire. But they want your euros for the children of Darfur. When Jacques called the NGO it wasn't aware of any connection with the brisk business going on at the gates of the Louvre.

Further along the quai, the Guardians of the deaf and dumb, pretty girls who thrust clipboards in your face, pointing out the words Sourds-Muets, when they're not busy chatting among themselves.

The next bridge: the Ring Trick, where evenly stationed "workers" "find" a fancy ring on the ground and ask tourists if they've lost it. If not, they offer to sell the ring to the tourists. When Jacques has threatened them with the police, they were annoyed with his interference.

French sculpture gallery

The Louvre itself is well-guarded by long lines of tourists, winding around the Pyramid and Cour Carrée. But we know a trick. The Porte des Lions never has any queue. You can walk right in. Shh---don't tell!

Queen of Sheba, 12th c.

We know by heart that secret entrance, the white stone stairs past the small but fascinating African/Oceanic/Pre-Columbian section, up past a young Edward VI and large canvases of London burning, through a room with dying Elizabeth I looking like a gnarled transvestite, through Murillo and El Greco and the other Spaniards with their liquid eyes, through the Grand Gallery with cold Poussin leading to hot Caravaggio, including his ravishing canvas of the Virgin in stark, police-procedural death, the mannerist Italians and Rafael, through the packed room of the Mona Lisa with its astounding Wedding Feast of Cana'a among the Veroneses and other Venitians, more dark and dense, ending up with the living colors of Titian. We took an elevator down to the sculpture galleries flooded with light and height.

13th c. Angel

We visited the arcade of medieval French sculpture (which is outshone by the Musée de Cluny collection). We took a journey from 10th century Languedoc, where the broad pagan beasts of the Romanesque, with their bulging eyes, shade into one of the idiosyncratic glories of French sculpture, the gothic.

14th c. Virgin

Kenneth Clark, in Civilisation, describes the humanism of those figures, perhaps deriving their sweetness from the songs of the troubadors, for here we have for the first time truly beautiful women.

"The look of selfless detachment and spirituality is something entirely new in art. Beside them the heroes of ancient Greece look arrogant, soulless and even slightly brutal."

The very stones radiate, in that moment of time, a kind of freshness and birth, before technique overwhelmed it.

Comtesse de Boulogne

But in the 14th century the angels turn inward, and Mary's smile is more superficial, and we come closer to the Renaissance, and the stones speak only to the glory of kings.

However, the 15th century brings a fantastic death cult, in the wake of the Plague in Europe and the Hundred Year War, when tombstones showed the very worms eating the guts of the distinguished deceased.

Marseillaise, imps reflected

The later French sculpture feels cold to the inner touch, except for the raging fury of La Marseillaise with her gash of a thundering mouth, and impish allegoric children in immaculate white marble.

Next door, space-time curved again, back to Mesopotamia.  Here is writing from Sumer, poems from 2500 BC. Here are the judicial reforms of the king of Lagash, Gudea.  He proposed relieving the sufferings of the poor and of women, as inscribed on a stone cone almost 5000 years ago. Then, the room of Hammurabi's code also speaks out for justice for the oppressed, but it is a fierce justice delivered by a demi-god.

And then the fabulous beasts of Mesopotamia----the massive bull men of Khorsabad of 700BC!

Khorsabad Court, Mesopotamia

So we end up more than 3000 years prior to the place where we had started. We'd seen only a small fraction of the Louvre. And that's where the great palace traps you---since you can never quite grasp the immensity of the sometimes suffocating collection, you can never resist going once again, the first Sunday of the month.