Visiting the Louvre

The Louvre in Paris is housed in an ancient palace.  It is very imposing with extensive walls and buildings and arches and corners.  And the entrance to the Louvre in Paris is situated in a modern glass pyramid which is impressive in its own way but looks nothing like the rest of the Louvre.   It’s not obviously the entrance.  Which is why it was possible for two people, one of whom had never been to the Louvre and the other who had been years ago before the pyramid was built, to spend a long time wandering through arches and round corners and up and down the side of walls just looking for the way in.  It wasn’t signposted.  Perhaps they think it’s louche to make it too obvious. We eventually asked a security guard.      

Once inside it’s like Casey’s Court, as my mother would have said – people everywhere.  We got a map and tried to go upstairs to sit in the café to decide what we were doing but Mike was stopped from going upstairs or rather, Mike’s umbrella was stopped from going upstairs.  So we went to check the umbrella into the cloakroom and were told that we couldn’t check the umbrella until we’d bought a ticket.   So we went to buy a ticket but found that because Mike is registered as disabled with his lousy breathing problems we could both go in for free – him as a man with a disability and me as a person accompanying him.  But because we were allowed in free they wouldn’t give us a ticket, not even a ticket acknowledging that they’d let us in freely. However, when we went back to check the umbrella in the other girl in the cloakroom wasn’t so rigorous and accepted it ticketless.

It’s very kind of the Louvre to let people with disabilities in free of charge but it would be helpful if they would acknowledge this on paper.  Because we did keep getting stopped and asked for our tickets and had to keep reiterating that one of us was disabled and the other of us was there to pick him up in case he fell over.

 

We went to look at Decorative Objects.  We would have liked to see some of the paintings but didn’t think we could cope with the crowds.  And I never knew that before they started making porcelain in Limoges, they made wonderful enamel works – very turquoise and green and blue.  I was even pointing them out from a distance before we’d finished.  “Look,” I’d say authoritatively, “I bet that’s Limoges”.  And it was. 

There were lots of intricate ancient pieces but very heavily Christian - lots and lots of crucifixions.   Wouldn’t it be nice if the symbol for Christianity was Christ being taken up into heaven on a cloud – flying rather than nailed down?  Or, if that would be difficult for people to wear round their necks,  how about the fish?    I have a Jewish friend who says she can't understand a religion that takes for it's symbol an ancient instrument of death by torture.  And I must say I agree with her.  

There were also amazing Flanders tapestries – and I started picking them out too.  They used a particular shade of red – especially on ones involving really cheerful looking bears.  And there were Venetian painted glasses and Spanish pottery painted with Moorish twirls and little brown and blue dots and circles. 

So we must have spent two or three hours looking at all that and didn’t get to any of the other sections.  Though we saw some of the French pseudo classical sculptures, most of which appeared to have been done after the Revolution.  I’m not overly keen on classical themes and find some of them particularly silly, even when they’ve been wonderfully executed.  Consider the idea of a naked man with a shawl over his arm and his dog beside him killing a stag.    It’s such a shame, as the sculptor goes to all that bother to make it look like a real man and a real dog and a real stag and then it falls down on detail.  Who goes stag hunting wearing nothing but a pashmina?  The Sunday shooting crowd in the Dordogne would laugh in your face – or shoot you.

We really weren’t up to anything further after the Decorative Objects and the few sculptures.  So we sat in the Richelieu café and had two very expensive pots of tea and a very expensive piece of cheesecake but, as we hadn’t paid to get in, that was alright. 

Just before we left the Louvre we were elevated to the glass pyramid entrance on a sort of rising platform, especially for the disabled, even if they were thinking of the disabled in wheelchairs.    It was wonderful, just like Jesus on a cloud.