05-31 THE LOUVRE MUSEUM

Once again you'll read that we aren't big fans of art but you can't say you've been to Paris and then say, "Uh, no, we didn't go to the Louvre,the largest museum in the world."

What IF there was something in there that we really needed to see? We wouldn't want to miss it. So in we went.



Although we had seen the lines that can take hours to get INTO the Louvre, we took our friend Rick Steves advice for the quickest way into the museum. From the time we got off the Metro (subway) until we were actually looking at artwork was only 20 minutes.

I'd read the text of the 90 minute Rick Steve's audio tour of the Louvre, the largest museum in the world, and it seems he was going to take us to all the important spots. This sounded like a good way to go.



Great. Headphones on. Bring up the audio guide on our iPhones and off we go.

We saw plenty of Greek and Roman statues to start with. The idea of their placement was to see how "beauty" changed through the ages in the eyes of the sculpturers. Supposedly Venus de Milo was the culmination of beauty in stone.







Our trek led us up a large flight of stairs to the Winged Victory of Samothrace. We are in the most popular art museum in the world and they allow us to take pictures. What's up with all the other ones?



These palaces all seem to have long hallways with art on the walls all the way down. The Louvre had a couple of them. At the end of one were THE Crown Jewels.



Half way down another long hall was a side room where the crowds had gathered to see the Mona Lisa. She's on a wall all by herself but she's only about 20x30 in size. She's behind glass now after her restoration in 2005. She was highly photogenic and everyone in the room seemed to have a camera.





She was a very popular lady.



We were there too!



We moved on to large rooms with huge paintings on them. One is of Napoleon's Coronation. His mother, who wasn't even there!, had been painted into the picture at Napoleon's request. When you are the King people have a tendency to do what you ask.



We ended our audio tour and headed off to find some "food" just outside the entrance to the Denon Wing. ANOTHER ham and cheese on a hard-shelled baugette. Can't they keep their bread soft? Subway can!



On the Louvre website we found these Museum Trail adventures you could do. One of them was the Da Vinci Code Trail. Some of this movie was filmed in here and the author took some liberties with interpreting the meaning of some of the pieces of art. So this written text takes you through the museum and explains its part in the movie and then tells you why the piece of art is really here.

(Please note, highly technical explanation on its way.) I went to their website and printed their text to a PDF file. I copied the PDF file up to the Internet via an application called Evernote. I have the Evernote app on both of our iPhones as well and it will pull down the file to our phones whatever I put up in Evernote. A few minutes later we had the file in a convenient and findable place on our phones for me to read while we were at the museum.

So, I started reading the text to Karen and we would locate the artwork and I'd read the museum's explanation of the movie/book. It was great fun and the type of "museuming" we like to do.

Here's an example of the liberties the movie takes. A guy dies and they say he dies in such and such a room but THAT room doesn't have the floor mosaic to match the room name. This OTHER room has that name. Another time the author interprets a gold medallion to locate the grave of Mary Magdelene but the medallion was put there in 1997 to mark the OLD Prime Meridian from back in the early 1900's.



We stayed in the Louvre for 4 hours. Some would say 4 days is not enough.



We moved on down the street to the Musee d'Orsay, an old train station that's been converted to a beautiful museum.



When you get upstairs to the giant clocks you can see through them!



I'm sure there were famous pieces of art in here but Whistler's Mother was not where she was supposed to be and there were signs saying Rodin this way but his Thinking Man was in HIS museum down the street.

So we enjoyed walking around and looking up at the architecture and the great building that has been repurposed.



There was an outside area with great views of the Seine as well. We ALWAYS like great views of the river. That is the Louvre across the river. Yes, it IS big.



We thought we had read that the Musee d'Orangerie across the river was open late tonight but when we got there they had closed. There were Monet's Water Lillies in there and we thought we should see them since an entire museum had been built just to show them off.

We sat and planned out tomorrow's day using our maps that we always carried and then we took a stroll down to the next bridge, the Pont Alexander III. It was built in 1900 for the World Exposisition. We like World's Fair stuff too so this was fun to see and photograph. It was late in the evening and the sun was shining right on the side of it. Nice way to end our day.