En route this overcast morning to our scheduled 8-hours 'working day' in the salles and galeries of Musée du Louvre we ambled through the Jardin du Palais Royal (aka Place des Vosges),
– and its artsy courtyard of sprouting columns:
Thence, a detour around and inside the once grand but now quite derelict Èglise de Saint-Eustache
but still sporting France's biggest and most powerful organ with no less than 8000 pipes.
Adjacent to the church is this climbable 70-tons sandstone sculpture "L'Écoute" (The Listener).
We stopped at a waterhole to stay coffeinated before entering the mother-of-all-museums.
It was apparently just another quiet Wednesday at the Louvre, but it felt like being in an anthill at rush hour. Just too may people to be enjoyable for us.
However, we persevered and our first inning lasted three hours, long enough for a thorough walk-thru of the galeries with Northern European and French paintings.
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| Peder Balke, 1847. "View of Trondheim, Norway" |
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| A handy study. Nicolas de Largillierre, 1715. "Études des Mains". |
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| Francois Biard, 1840. "Magdalena Bay, Spitzberg". |
We dived into the smallest canvasses
and tried to take in the overwhelmingly large ones.
We were then duely exhausted and headed outside for a Time-out.
After a very late lunch and an extended power nap we ventured back into the cultural anthill for our second inning to check out more masterpieces from bygone times.
Evening survivors in the Louvre watch the survivors on Théodore Géricault's Le Radeau de la Méduse (The Raft of the Medusa), a cornerstone of the French romantic period.
Whom are they all looking at?
This contemporary Mona Lisa, of course!
Well, also this 515 year-old Florentine lady, Lisa Gherardini, aka La Gioconda, aka Mona Lisa.
The Louvre is indeed capitalizing on all sorts of merchandize with Leonardo da Vinci's famous model.
A skywards view from the bottom of Louvre's glass pyramide concludes a fine, but long and strenuous day amongst millennia of art.
