Our Louvre memberships allow us each to take a guest Wednesday and Friday evenings, and we took advantage of that twice with our most recent visitors. I’ll post our visits separately, since, even practicing restraint, I want to include too many pictures.
The first Friday we started in the Sully wing (actually the huge quadrangle at the east end) to enjoy Robert Wilson’s “Living room” (see blog “Art overload: le Louvre”) before moving on to Greek and Roman art, noticing the architecture and decorative aspects of the building itself, passing through an extremely ornate, gilded hall filled with portraits mostly of architects, with a few painters, and some kings (David noticed that all the kings were painted as if they were cameos on plates, surrounded by decorations), then moving on to the Denon wing to peruse a couple of galleries of Italian painting, including Mona, where the crowd was thinner than usual, and ending up in the new Islamic art “wing” which is actually a separate, two-level, glass-walled, swoopy-roofed structure in a big interior courtyard. Does that sound breathless? Really, we tried to limit ourselves, and we did skip a whole lot.
>> Part of Robert Wilson’s collection and a dreamy view through glass of the pyramid and Richelieu wing, with the ferris wheel in the distance.
>> A Roman fighter cast in the 1st c and a rotund Greek with a cup.
>> The portrait hall restored to its one-time glory. St Jean-Baptiste 1513-1515 by Léonardo de Vinci (1452-1519).
>> From the Islamic art collection: Cat incense burner, 2nd c. Khorasan or central Asia. Ceramic mosaic walls.
Before leaving, Diana and I checked out the boutique and children’s bookstore, where I bought English language versions of a couple of excellent books: How to talk to children about Impressionism by Christophe Hardy and A kid’s guide to the Louvre for adults by Isabelle Bonithon Courant. They are full of information and insight.
The Grays in Europe 
Lucky us. We are so grateful. These nights at the Louvre were highlights for us. It was such a privilege to be there able to take the time to gawk at the ceilings, the walls, the floors, the space. At every turn, there was something astonishingly beautiful, or older than anything, or impossible to understand, or so fascinating that we had to remember to keep going. We appreciate your eye, Kathleen. I love the (je ne sais quoi) “rock star” quality of de Vinci’s St Jean-Baptiste. That’s fun. Around the corner was the Mona Lisa, and on this night, she was waiting for us. No crowd. She, in a sense, had the room to herself (and the surveillance cameras). It was a beautiful night.