The Louvre
Housing 35 thousand pieces of art from nearly every civilization and covering 645 thousand square feet of exhibition space, the Louvre is a big imposing bastard of a museum.
After an initial attempt to visit the world-renowned site the day before, Blaire and I arrived at the Louvre early, as per the advice of our travel books, and found a vastly different scene than the day before. Where once was a wide, sweeping pavilion with fountains, benches and enough room to house a soccer field, was now filled with lines of people hundreds of meters long, snaking between the quiet fountains and twisting back upon themselves.
The easiest time to snap a picture at the Louvre? When you're too dumb to realize it's closed.
However, after waiting a surprisingly short time in line, we passed through multipurpose glass pyramid, which served as both doorway and skylight to the cavernous, two-story lobby below. Stopping by we grabbed an english-language map and went upon our way.
Our first goal was the Mona Lisa, or la Joconde, so we inserted ourselves into the current of people streaming steps worn smooth from passage of millions upon millions of feet—the Louvre sees about 8.5 million people a year or around 12 thousand a day. We soon found ourselves at the foot of Victoire de Samothrace, the nearly 11-foot tall sculpture of Nike, Greek Goddess of Victory. Her mighty wings outstretched and with an unseen wind curling her robes against her, she welcomes visitors to the mighty collection of Roman and Greek artwork, which we pushed ourselves towards, having tired of the never-ending push of people behind us.
Threading our way through an epoch of art, starting with Greek, Roman and Estrucan, we hopped off in Medieval pagan-diety woodcarvings and jumped back to Egyptian and Mesopotamian artifacts before leaping forward again to finish with four centuries worth of Italian paintings.
Not pictured: Da Vinci's easily broken "code."
Still searching for the most famous painting in the world, we turned a corner and found ourselves at the outer edge of jumbled mass of people surging forward to look at her; the Mona Lisa. For all the myths surrounding her, she disappointed Blaire and I. The famous smiling lady, shielded behind bulletproof glass in an environmentally sealed case following several vandalism attempts and one theft, is 30 inches high and 20 inches wide, is guarded by four stout, serious security guards who keep people at least 10 feet back, which makes the sfumato-style painting look like a blurry photograph.
After making our way past several nude statues of gods and goddesses (with Blaire pointing at each male statue and giggling; she feels that certain “aspects” are either sadly lacking or wishful thinking), a full room of “Art in Bronze,” and spending several hours traipsing through the various wings and exhibits, we called it a night but promised to return.
And return we did, four nights later and spent another four or five hours viewing the pieces we missed the first time, including Venus de Milo and a giant Egyptian head we took photos off because everyone seemed impressed to see it and we didn’t want to feel left out.
The grand total? Near ten hours of visit time, thousands of paintings, sculptures and artifacts seen and Blaire and I never visited the third floor. An entire floor! A third of the world’s most renowned art, us yards away from it, and we never saw it.
But, we figure it can also count as an excuse to go back, right?
