Paris: Art Museums – Part 1 Louvre

A big part of our trip was seeing art in museums. Our guide Agathe studied art history and I learned SO MUCH from her. I can’t possibly capture it all. So, I will do a few different posts with highlights.

The Louvre has served as a palace and a fortress, but people in our time know it as an amazing museum. It houses art from antiquities through the mid 1800s.

The Louvre is huge. If a person visited all the art without stopping for food or sleep, it would take over 300 days. Visiting only during open hours and stopping for lunch would take 7 years. So, we visited only some masterpieces. Masterpieces were defined as works that inspired other artists or changed the course of art. Essentially, the pieces referred to repeatedly.

I saw the Mona Lisa in the 80s, so didn’t push through the huge crowd to get a close look. The crowds in the 80s were smaller, even though my visits were peak tourist time. The phenomenon of its popularity intrigues me as much as the painting itself.

Venus de Milo was found on the Greek island of Milos. The Greek goddess of love was Aphrodite; the Roman goddess of love was Venus. So, a bit of a misnomer!

Since she is a goddess, she does not have human characteristics like cellulite and body hair. Her face is exactly symmetrical, expressionless and a bit androgynous. Agathe said her proportions are also off: her torso and legs are more like Barbie than a human woman! This led to an interesting discussion of nude women in the art at the Louvre: the official word is there are none. The nudes are goddesses, muses and angels, not human women.

This fascinates me. First, it seems like a lie, wink/nudge, farce, emperor has no clothes. Second, if taken at face value, why have non-women-that-look-like-women? Were the artists/the art world/society purportedly protecting women from being models? Or promoting an absurd ideal of feminine beauty that doesn’t exist, in the same way air brushed bodies and waxed vulvas are promoted today? I really need to learn more.

The Winged Victory was another beautiful Greek sculpture and I don’t remember a thing that Agathe said about it! From Wikipedia: The total height of the monument is 5.57 meters (18 ft, 3 in) including the socle; the statue alone measures 2.75 meters (9 ft). The sculpture is one of a small number of major Hellenistic statues surviving in the original, rather than Roman copies. Winged Victory has been exhibited at the Louvre Museum in Paris, at the top of the main staircase, since 1884.^[3]