Day 05 August 20, 2008
Today was the first assault on the Louvre, the former palace turned art museum. We covered all of two floors in two different wings in about 3.5 hours during the evening. It's a ridiculous amount of art plundered from the world housed in one place. Good job, France. You really did steal the best.
The most famous painting, of course, is the Mona Lisa (La Jaconde) by Leonardo da Vinci. By the way, we did see two of the other Turtles, Raphael and Michaelangelo, but not Donatello. So anyway, the gallery room she's in also holds the massively large Wedding Feast at Cana. Any other place and it'd be the star of the museum, but nooooo. Wedding Feast has to bunk with Mona.
Here's an idea of the isolation of Mona Lisa compared to the chumminess of the other paintings.
I discovered my favorite painting in the Louvre already. Yes, I like to make snap judgments! It's "Clytemnestre hesitant avant de frapper Agamemnon endormi" by Pierre-Narcisse Guerin and it's brilliant. The colors and the story it tells blows my mind. She's being goaded by her lover to kill her husband, the king. Will she do it? I think she does.
For more Louvre-y photos, see here. I don't mean to insult your intelligence if you already knew to go to the Photos link up at the top to see all photos. No, wait, I did mean to.