The first place we visited on our first full day in Paris was the Louvre.
At this early point in our trip, I had recovered enough from jetlag, but was not yet exhausted enough from parenting in a foreign country, to anticipate the children’s needs. And so, I sagely made us all sit down right after we walked in the door to drink some water and do a brief meditation (you laugh, but it’s magic), and just…chill for a sec. Check the map. Make a plan to avoid being paralyzed by choice in the largest museum in the world.
I was so right. We all needed to study the map and figure out where we all wanted to go and in what order. But mainly…the kids FEEL ASLEEP right there on the benches outside of the bathrooms. Behold, a still life:
I’m jumping ahead here, but after we completed our bustling, crowded jaunt through the Louvre, I tried to capture the experience in writing. This is what came to me, as I pecked away on my phone in the metro on the way back…it reads a bit like a poem, but it’s really just the notes I jotted down:
The Louvre is hot.
The Louvre is crowded.
The Louvre has many stairs, and it's unclear why or where some of the stairs go. Some of the stairs go to the same places.
There are many paintings.
There are many sculptures.
Some are a couple hundred years old. Some are 5,000 years old.
Many of the art works were created solely because of vanity.
There is a whole gold room where temporarily important people congratulated each other permanently.
I wonder if it's okay that there are so many coffins.
There is at least one dead body; it is a mummy.
You are not allowed to have food or beverage in the Louvre, but we snuck in our bottled water. No one checked.
I think that captures it fairly well, to be honest.
Art vs. History…onics
I had a friend tell me that visiting the Louvre kind of sucks, and we’d have a better experience with the art at the Musée d'Orsay.
This is partially true but requires some explanation: The Musée d'Orsay is incredible. It used to be a train station.
It’s new for a Parisian museum—created only in 1986—and is focused on about 66 years of art, from 1848 to 1914. But it includes the names you actually know from vaguely paying attention once in school, like Van Gogh, Monet, Renoir, et al.
It’s also organized nicely, with each artist getting their own roomlet in a long series of roomlets. Impressionists are largely with the other impressionists, the neo-impressionists are together, the expressionists are together, and so on. So, like, you can look at one long wall and see, in a series of paintings, how Renoir’s arthritis affected his work over the last years of his life. It’s that kind of layout that gently guides you to a deeper of understanding of the art and the artists.
It’s a large museum, but not overwhelmingly so, and it’s designed with a big open space in the middle with several floors of rooms all along the sides. So at various points, you can look over and see the whole of the place.
It’s too much to inhale in one day, though. And if you and your family are at the end of your weeklong trip and are all kind of melting down and don’t even have enough emotional capacity to wait in the lengthy queue to get a morsel of food from the cafeteria in hopes of surfacing a shred of energy so you stop even trying by 2pm, you’ll probably get to check out the fifth floor only before you give up on the day and go seethe somewhere for the rest of the afternoon. Or whatever.
The Louvre, by contrast, is a different beast. Yes, it houses some of the most famous works of art ever, but you shouldn’t try to go there to see art per se. You go there to experience the Louvre itself. The place is loaded with history. Eg, the first part of it was built some 800 or so years ago as a fort, because a French king (Philip II) found himself in a conflict that he didn’t want to deal with because he was already doing some Crusading. So he built a fort—the original bit of the Louvre—and a big wall to go with it. And, believe it or not, that worked.
And that’s just literally the first thing about the Louvre! In the meantime, various Napoleons built parts of the Louvre, royalty lived there, parts of it burned to the ground, a lot of people were slaughtered in the middle of it, Dan Brown used it as a setting for a dumb book that got turned into a dumb movie, and so on.
There’s nicer history of the place, too. Like there was a stretch a long time ago where it was open on certain days to budding artists, who could come and take paintings off the wall to copy them up close. Other days, the paintings were rehung and the place was open to the public to stroll through. Also, in 1793 it was turned into an actual museum, which was a cool move.
Mona Lisa from far away
And…yes, the Mona Lisa is there. You kind of have to go see her just to say you did. But it’s without a doubt the worst art viewing experience possible. The room is mega crowded, and you have to stand in yet anOTHER QUEUE just to get close. And “close” is like 10 feet away, at best. And she’s behind bulletproof glass, with guards flanking her. And the painting is small. Like, poster-sized. Maybe.
Between the distance, the glass, and the size, you can see zero detail. Someone could have stolen the Mona Lisa and replaced it with a colored-pencil facsimile, and you’d barely be able to tell.
I want to argue that all these measures are stupid, but the day after we were there, the infamous pie guy showed up and made international news for what amounted to…making a slight mess on the bulletproof glass and probably getting beaten to death in the Louvre dungeon.
At this point, the Mona Lisa is just famous for being famous. So you have to go say hello, even though it sucks.
Some of the things
There is other famous art to see–the Venus de Milo, Winged Victory, a Sphinx–you know, the stuff you see in Beyoncé music videos. There are also extraordinary things like 3,000-year-old hieroglyphics and a 5,000-year-old knife.
And as I mentioned in my notes above, there are a LOT of coffins. Sarcophagi. You get the uneasy feeling that maybe the Louvre has more than its share of these? And maybe they should have left them where they found them? Like, one or two would have been neat. But 50? Plus one actual mummy? That’s just asking for trouble.
There’s also a stretch of European Catholic art from like 500 years ago, which is more interesting than I expected. These sculptures are predominantly wood. I can’t recall seeing many wooden sculptures…ever?
There’s a gorgeous one of Mary Magdalene, replete with her trademark flowing, flaming red hair.
My fashionista 12-year-old was gobsmacked by the Galerie d’Apollon, which is so filled with gold and jewels that it smells different than the rest of the place. She could have stayed in there for years. As it was, she just about filled up the camera’s SD card in the 15-20 minutes we were in there.
Personally, I loved the halls near the Mona Lisa, which are filled with huge canvases that contain indirect stories of all the Napoleonic social drama. Like “Coronation” by David (Napoleon’s official painter at the time–what a gig), which is the one where Napoleon wanted a painting of himself crowning his wife. This was scandalous, because it’s supposed to be the Pope doing the crowning. The Pope just HAD to be in the piece, though, so as a middle-fingered compromise, David included the Pope–but not doing the crowning. Just sort of sitting there looking defeated.
Also, although Napoleon's mother wasn’t at the actual coronation, David snuck her in the peanut gallery in the painting. He also painted himself doing a sketch of the coronation, which he would later use to create the painting in which he painted himself. Very meta. So…not so much art appreciation as old-timey shade and flame appreciation.
Whiplash
But all of that is just a sampling of a sampling of a few floors in one edge of the vast place. Granted, it’s the part with all the most famous stuff you have to see. There is a bit of whiplash, though, jumping continents and millennia floor-to-floor.
Like the rest of Paris, there’s no way to see everything in the Louvre in one go. And you shouldn’t try, or you’ll find yourself speed-walking past everything instead of taking any of it in.
You also need to budget time for unpredictable time-suckers, like standing in a tiny bathroom stall for what feels like 45 minutes while a small child takes their jolly old time taking their afternoon ablutions.
This piece is part of a series of pieces around our recent trip to Paris. There’s more to come, but you can catch up to where we are so far by reading these. In chronological order: