The Louvre

Yesterday we all visited the Louvre.  We got into Paris around 2:30 and a girl who went on the Versailles trip last year (Whitney Bost) flew to Versailles that day to spend her fall break here.  She met up with our group and came to the Louvre with us.  After we got our tickets we went in and were free to go wherever we wanted on our own.  So I walked around with Katie and Michael.  We walked up to the 2nd floor (there are 4 levels, but the bottom two levels are called the ground floor and the lower ground floor), so basically we walked all the way up to the fourth level of the building.  We looked at all the works up there and looked mainly for the works that we had learned about in our classes, like the works of Flagonard, Watteau, David, Ingres, La Tour, and others.  After walking through the French paintings section, we made our way to the Italian painters, and I've got to say, finding your way in the Louvre is not easy.  It is an absolutely enormous building--it was the palace of the kings of France originally before Louis XIV decided to move to Versailles and have the Chateau of Versailles built there.  The architecture of the building is beautiful and I can't imagine what the kings did with all the space they had.  It was so ridiculously large.  

Eventually we did find our way to the section of the building that housed all the Italian paintings.  This was a bit more enjoyable because there were more well-known works here, and since I don't really know much about art, it was nice to recognize some things.  Of course we saw DaVinci's Mona Lisa.  When we first entered the room where that painting was housed, I at first didn't see her because the painting isn't very big and there were a lot of people around it, covering it up.  Plus it was placed in a room that had massive colorful paintings around it, so I was also distracted by the other paintings around me before I finally realized that I was in the room where the Mona Lisa was.   We saw works by Giovanni and also saw the large painting of the coronation of Napoleon.  Before seeing this painting, we visited the Galery of Apollo, which is one of the most elaborately decorated and rich rooms I've ever been in.  It was overwhelming, but in a good way because you just kept looking up all around you, taking it all in.  It was fancy.  We also saw the actual crown of Napoleon which formerly belonged to Charlemagne enclosed in a glass case in this room--the same crown that was in that grand painting.  After looking at the Italian paintings, we looked at some Etruscan art, and then Greek and Roman sculptures.  We saw some of the works of Michealangelo and some other beautiful statues of Grecian and Roman gods and goddesses.  And then we saw the Venus de Milo.  It was very cool.  Then we moved to Egyptian art, which I've always found very interesting.  The sarcophaguses and hieroglyph stone tablets were my favorite things to look at.  They even had mummified cats in that section--which kind of made me cringe because all I could think about was shriveled cats.  Ugh. 

     By the time we finished with Egyptian art, we had spent about 3 and a half hours in the Louvre and were tired.  Katie and I had lost Michael at some point, so we decided to go back to Versailles together, and it literally took us like 30 minutes to get out of that building.  It's kind of embarrassing how long it took us because we kept trying to find our way out and ended up taking a lot wrong turns and staircases and ended up at dead ends.  It was pretty frustrating, but thank God we finally did find our way out.  We took the metro back to La Defense and hopped on a train to Versailles.  We then discovered we were on the wrong train so we got out at the next stop and had to wait 5 minutes for the next train.  Eventually one came and we got back around 8:00.  We were pretty tired because it took us about an hour and a half total to exit the Louvre, take the metro, and then take the train.  It was a long day, but worth the trouble because we saw some pretty amazing and historical works of art.  

     This weekend I'm staying in Versailles and will probably spend the weekend in Paris--hopefully I will have some interesting stories to tell.  Until then...