“We’ve seen a lot of Greek sculptures, and a lot of them look alike. They’re all really good, so what makes the Venus de Milo so special?” An excellent question raised by Joseph after viewing one of the Big Three exhibits in the Louvre, and I thought about it the rest of the day and into the night as I lay in bed not sleeping.
We spent most of the day in our apartment resting, doing schoolwork, and preparing meals. The sun finally returned to Paris, and its rays seeped through our windows as a soft, steady breeze gently pushed the curtains from the walls. From the top of our building between the sounds of passing cars, we could hear the pigeons cooing, sounding content in the warm sunshine. With most of our list of must-do activities in Paris complete, we enjoyed the time together anticipating a late afternoon visit to the Louvre. No trip to Paris is complete without touring the most famous art museum in the world, mainly to be able to answer “Yes, we went to the Louvre” to inquiries from friends and family about time spent in the City of Light.
OK, let’s get real here. Despite the fact that the Louvre houses thousands of priceless treasures from the world of art spanning the millennia, the majority of visitors go there to see the big three: the Winged Victory, the Venus de Milo, and the Mona Lisa. One of the three is headless, and another is lacking arms, for crying out loud. There are people out there who try to set records for Louvre visits with the big three pieces as the only targets, and I think six minutes is the current mark. As Deena and I planned our visit, before checking the internet, we could not come up with any other pieces of art we wanted to see in the museum other than the big three, and we had already seen them over twenty years ago. We used our British Museum strategy and viewed several Louvre highlight lists then narrowed it down to our own top ten. We did not have the luxury of time as we did in London, and there was no point in frantically running down the halls of the museum trying to see everything, so we came up with a good list of pieces to view, most of which we had never heard.
The sky was brilliant blue on this day, and as the sun cast shadows on cornices and arches, we enjoyed a new perspective of the buildings of Paris previously hidden to us by the cloudy weather . Our metro stop put us right in front of the side access to the museum entrance, and I. M. Pei’s glass pyramid came into view as we got closer. The shape of the Louvre is a massive U, and it surrounds a vast courtyard with the pyramid entrance in the center. There was no shelter from the sun, and we could feel our necks already starting to burn as we joined the long queue of potential visitors. After thirty minutes, we had moved about thirty feet. I did a little quick figuring and determined that based on our current trajectory and speed of movement, we would reach the entrance in about two hours.
We began a discussion about whether or not we should continue our present course, but no member of the crew was willing to accept responsibility for a definitive decision. I had a serious mind game going on inside my head envisioning a good dad dressed in white on my right shoulder and an evil dad dressed in red on my left. The good dad was whispering in my ear, “You should wait it out. You have two bright children with you who may not have another opportunity to see the Mona Lisa. They will be denigrated by all their friends and family when it’s discovered they went to Paris and didn’t visit the Louvre.” The evil dad was whispering, “You should bail. What’s the point of standing for hours in the sun just to see three pieces of art? You can save the thirty euro and put it toward a relaxing boat ride on the Seine instead.” The tension of this debate was palpable, and I was on the verge of opening my mouth to utter a decision when a museum guard walked out, lifted a rope, and motioned the whole queue inside the museum—our destiny was clear, and I was off the hook. We found out later that a computer glitch knocked out the ticketing system, and the long queue was the result of the lengthy effort to fix it.
We began a discussion about whether or not we should continue our present course, but no member of the crew was willing to accept responsibility for a definitive decision. I had a serious mind game going on inside my head envisioning a good dad dressed in white on my right shoulder and an evil dad dressed in red on my left. The good dad was whispering in my ear, “You should wait it out. You have two bright children with you who may not have another opportunity to see the Mona Lisa. They will be denigrated by all their friends and family when it’s discovered they went to Paris and didn’t visit the Louvre.” The evil dad was whispering, “You should bail. What’s the point of standing for hours in the sun just to see three pieces of art? You can save the thirty euro and put it toward a relaxing boat ride on the Seine instead.” The tension of this debate was palpable, and I was on the verge of opening my mouth to utter a decision when a museum guard walked out, lifted a rope, and motioned the whole queue inside the museum—our destiny was clear, and I was off the hook. We found out later that a computer glitch knocked out the ticketing system, and the long queue was the result of the lengthy effort to fix it.
The folks at the Louvre are well aware of how their artistic bread is buttered, and there are signs with pictures of their resident celebrities posted everywhere with arrows pointing out the paths to their rooms. Our strategy was simple: we’ll make our way to the big three with the rest of our top ten exhibits in mind, locating them through inference based upon the system of categorization employed by the Louvre. Within ten minutes of purchasing our tickets, we were standing in front of the Winged Victory taking note of the intended viewing angle—one side is rough hewn; the other is graceful and delicate. Within another twenty minutes, we were in the hall outside Mona Lisa’s chamber, and we could see her enigmatic smile through bulletproof glass from across the room. Between two bored security guards and a swirling mosh pit of tourists, jostling for position presented a formidable obstacle for our children to view this renaissance gem, and we left them to their own methods. With smartphones in hand, and the devil-may-care attitude that only teenagers possess, the kids cut through the crowd, took their photos, and within a couple of minutes, Deena and I were validated as parents.
Within another thirty minutes, we were in the hall of Greek sculpture viewing the Venus de Milo in the midst of a much smaller and friendlier crowd. There is no questioning the beauty of this sculpture. Even though she’s stationary, she still has the appearance of movement as if in the process of turning, and her thin, graceful cloth covering appears ready to slither down her hips at any moment. The experts still can’t agree who pulled this thing of beauty from a block of marble, but whoever it was got it right. We wandered through the rest of the rooms viewing the mostly male Greek sculptures, and now in addition to being a painter, I’m qualified to be a urologist as well. Nudity is the main theme here in the Louvre, and we’ve seen more skin here than on a long stretch of Myrtle Beach on a sunny day in July.
We spent the better part of two hours touring the Louvre and managed to see most of our top-ten items on the way to visit the rock stars. My favorite items were the Botticelli frescoes with centuries-old lime leaching through the pigments in the plaster giving them a frosty appearance that was exquisite. In the hall outside Mona Lisa’s room, Deena enjoyed several other paintings by Leonardo Da Vinci that were masterful and engaging and had no crowds around them. We all enjoyed the huge, granite sphinx, one of the largest of such statues accessible outside of Egypt. The last piece of art we made an effort to see was Liberty Leading the People, painted by Eugene Delacroix in 1830, a work that has come to symbolize the national pride of France. In keeping with the theme of the Louvre, Lady Liberty can’t keep her dress up and doesn’t seem to care a lick about it.
So, back to my son’s question: what makes the Venus de Milo so special? I found a couple of quotes from two perspectives, the first from Jonathan Jones writing for The Guardian: “The Venus de Milo is an accidental surrealist masterpiece. Her lack of arms makes her strange and dreamlike. She is perfect but imperfect, beautiful but broken—the body as a ruin. That sense of enigmatic incompleteness has transformed an ancient work of art into a modern one." The second quote is from writer Karen Opas on the Quora website: “What sets it apart is marketing. During the late neoclassic period the French ruling class and intelligentsia, perhaps unconsciously trying to reassert cultural dominance after their military losses, put out a lot of 19th century PR about the amazing qualities of the Venus de Milo.”
I think the same things can be said about each member of the Louvre trinity—the hype brings the masses through the doors, and their beauty captures them once they stand in their presence. Are they any better than other masterpieces displayed in other parts of the world? Perhaps, but art is subjective and open to the interpretation and individual enjoyment of the person standing in front of it at the time. As parents, Deena and I feel an obligation to show and teach our children as much as we can, and with some loving guidance, help them to see which objects of art are worthy of consideration as they relate to history. From that point, they can decide which ones make them smile the most—isn’t that what art is all about? So, we went to Paris, and yes, we visited the Louvre.
The Louvre
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