After our return to Paris, from Bruges, this morning, our first port of call after dropping off our bags at our hotel was the Louvre Museum, which is home to some of the most valued artefacts and artworks from all over the world.
We had initially scheduled to reach Paris by 10 AM in the morning followed by a visit to Louvre by 12 noon. However, our Thalys train had a technical issue at Brussels and it started an hour late. That actually shortened our tour of the Louvre. We now had to restrict us to certain masterpieces only...
The museum is housed in the Palais du Louvre, a former royal palace located on the right bank of the Seine, between the Tuileries Gardens and the church of Saint-Germain l'Auxerrois. While the origins of the palace have not been accurately dated (believed to date back to the 13th century), the present structure has evolved in stages since the 16th century...
The palace was the seat of power in France until Louis XIV moved it to Versailles in 1682, bringing the government with him. The Louvre remained the formal seat of government until 1789. After that, the palace has housed the museum as well as various government departments...
Arriving at the Louvre and we get a glimpse of the Louvre Pyramid, was designed by the legendary architect, I.M. Pei...
The famous Pyramide du Louvre, or the Louvre Pyramid serves as the main entrance to the Musée du Louvre. The large glass and metal pyramid is surrounded by three smaller pyramids, in the main courtyard, Cour Napoléon, of the Louvre Palace. The large pyramid was commissioned by the President France François Mitterrand in 1984 and was completed in 1989, and has become a landmark of the city of Paris, after being popularized by the The Da Vinci Code...
The pyramid and the underground lobby beneath it was constructed because the Louvre's original main entrance, which could no longer handle the enormous number of visitors on an everyday basis.Nowadays, visitors entering through the pyramid descend into the spacious lobby then re-ascend into the main Louvre buildings...
The Cour Napoléon teeming with people, posing as though they are touching the top of the pyramid...
The pyramid has been controversial since it was constructed because many people felt that the modern structure looked quite out of place in front of the classic architecture of the Louvre...
Another bizarre controversy centres around the claim that the glass panes in the pyramid number exactly 666, which is regarded as "the number of the beast", often associated with Satan. Dominique Stezepfandt's book François Mitterrand, Grand Architecte de l'Univers says "the pyramid is dedicated to a power described as the Beast in the Book of Revelation (...) The entire structure is based on the number 6."
It is believed that this bizarre story of 666 panes originated in the 1980s, when the official brochure of museum did cite this number twice, though a few pages earlier the total number of panes was given as 672 instead. This number also appeared in various newspapers. The official version from museum claims that the finished pyramid has 673 glass panes - 603 rhombi and 70 triangles...
Dan Brown's 2003 best-seller novel, The Da Vinci Code, in which the symbologist, Robert Langdon, mentions that "this pyramid, at President Mitterrand's explicit demand, had been constructed of exactly 666 panes of glass — a bizarre request that had always been a hot topic among conspiracy buffs who claimed 666 was the number of Satan". We perhaps would never know what the true story is...
Entering the museum through the pyramid. Thanks to the Paris Pass, we got in through the express entrance skipping the long lines...
Various sculptures...
We did not pay too much attention to this section as we were targeting seeing the Mona Lisa first...
A painting by Anne-Louis Girodet titled Pygmalion et Galatee de 1819 showing Pygmalion falling in love with his sculpture...
The Apotheosis of Homer, a grand painting by Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres in 1827, depicts Homer being crowned by a winged figure personifying victory over the universe...
Grande Odalisque, an oil painting of 1814 by Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres depicting a concubine...
Leonidas at Thermopylae is an 1814 painting by Jacques-Louis David that shows the Spartan king Leonidas prior to the Battle of Thermopylae...
Cupid and Psyche (1819) by Francois-Edouard Picot, depicts the famous tale where Psyche is lured into a mysterious castle in which she was served by formless servants and visited nightly by her invisible husband who flees every morning...
Le Sacre de Napoléon is a painting completed in 1807 by Jacques-Louis David, was the official painter of Napoleon, depicts the crowning and the coronation of Napoleon that took place at Notre-Dame de Paris...
The Sleep of Endymion, 1791, by Anne -Louis Girodet de Roussy-Trioson depicts the shepherd, Endymion, a man of ideal beauty, being visited at night by the goddess Diana in the form of a moonbeam...
The Winged Victory of Samothrace, also called the Nike of Samothrace, a 2nd-century BC marble sculpture of the Greek goddess Nike (Victory), which is on display at the Louvre since 1884...
Heading towards the most famous exhibit of the Louvre, the Mona Lisa or La Jaconde, as the French call it...
Venus and the Three Graces Presenting Gifts to a Young Woman, a fresco painting by the Italian Renaissance painter Sandro Botticelli...
The Crucifix by the Giotto di Bondone...
Andrea Mantegna's St. Sebastian was once part of the Altar of San Zeno in Verona. The painting illustrates the saint, tied to a classical arch, while being martyred, with his head and eyes turned toward the heavens...
Les Noces de Cana or the Wedding Feast at Cana, by Paolo Veronese is one of the biggest paintings at the Louvre. The painting depicts a miracle story from the New Testament, in which Jesus and his disciples were invited to a wedding celebration in Cana in the Galilee...
And finally, the moment we had been waiting for... the Mona Lisa, which is regarded as the best known, the most visited, the most written about, the most sung about, the most parodied work of art in the world...
Massive crowds waiting to see the Mona Lisa which is on the wall straight ahead...
There were immense crowds in front of the painting, which is placed behind a bulletproof glass shield, and Neeti snaked her way through to take a peek and click a few pictures...
The title of Leonardo de Vinci's masterpiece, comes from a description by Renaissance art historian Giorgio Vasari, who wrote "Leonardo undertook to paint, for Francesco del Giocondo, the portrait of Mona Lisa, his wife." Mona in Italian is a polite form of address originating as ma donna – similar to Ma’am, Madam, or my lady in English. This became madonna, and its contraction mona...
Leonardo began painting the Mona Lisa in the early 1500s in Florence, Italy. In 1516, Leonardo was invited by King François I to work in France and it is believed that he took the Mona Lisa with him and continued to work on it after he moved here. When he died, the painting was inherited, alongwith other works, by his pupil and assistant, Salaì. The French monarch, Francis I bought the painting and kept it at Palace of Fontainebleau, where it remained until Louis XIV moved the painting to the Palace of Versailles. After the French Revolution, it was moved to the Louvre, but spent a brief period in the bedroom of Napoleon in the Tuileries Palace. It was moved a number of times during the Franco-Prussian War and the Second World War to ensure its safety...
On August 21, 1911, the painting was stolen from the Louvre by an Italian employee of the Louvre, who wanted to restore the masterpiece to Italy. It was recovered a few years later in 1914 and brought back to the Louvre...
For years now, there has been a speculation about who the woman really was and what were the hidden messages in the painting. A speculation is that Leonardo had painted himself in a female form. A simple Google search would reveal these myths, some of which are really wild while some are in the realm of reasonability...
But all said and done, there is some strange allure about this painting that draws you to it. That probably is the magic of the artist, Leonardo da Vinci...
As the crowds keep thronging to the lady, we keep getting pushed around...
And she seems to be smiling at us, saying goodbye as we proceed to see other masterpieces in the Louvre...
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