Paris: Walk through the Louvre Stories

Long back, when I read the novel Da Vinci Code, and in it about the secret society, the inverted Pyramid, the chalice and Mary Magdalene, Louvre remained a curiosity and a place to visit. My sister moved to Poland in 2018 and I happened to visit Louvre during our family trip to Europe.

My knowledge about paintings at the time can be summed up in one line, “Some of them do look good on walls!”. Looking at those huge paintings on walls of Louvre, I felt I had seen some of these in the pages of history book during the school days and few lucky ones even got further detailed by me to have appropriate accessories such as handguns, knives, cigarette pipe, curly mustaches, and tika on their forehead. Did I draw a long beard on Monalisa and made her wear turban back then? Probably, but my childhood memory on that is vague. Monalisa was the attraction for me to visit Louvre!

Louvre is a huge museum. It’s a palace. We started with the exhibit of Egyptian and Greek artifacts and jewelry. Beautiful precious stones, violet, ultramarine, cobalt, blue, pink, amaranth organized creatively in shiny metal chains and rings! In one of her TED talk, Helen Fisher, a famous anthropologist, said that technological innovation and advances do not change our basic desires and fundamental ways we love. Maybe, the same argument could be extended to what we love to wear as well! Afterall, after thousands of years, we still make jewelry out of the same natural stones and metals, just the way did men and women from ancient civilizations, and after thousands of years we still wear it in the same fashion as did those men and women!

Countless sculptures are spread across hallways and the surrounding area of the museum. It is quite interesting to see how many ways nudity is used to reflect spectrum of emotions and feelings in these sculptures and paintings. Naked body, of young Spartacus, supporting the body of large slave becomes the epitome of tenderness whereas it becomes a pure aesthetic appeal in Sleeping Hermaphroditus. In Three Graces, it highlights the closeness and affection between the graces whereas the disproportionate body in Grande Odalisque depicts the devious sensuality.

After navigating through various other exhibits, we finally reached the Monalisa hall. Monalisa is kept on upper floors, probably on purpose, and it takes hours to navigate through various galleries. When we arrived at the hall though, it proved a bit anticlimactic. Monalisa’s portrait is barely 2 feet as opposed to the other huge wall size paintings. Compared to the other paintings, Monalisa looked like a passport size photograph! I wonder whether Leonardo DaVinci decided one morning to do Monalisa just to put leftover colors to good use after the previous night he was done with huge painting of some rich and ugly, high paying nobleman! Anyway, I made my way through all the jostling in the hall, reached closer and was able to get good view, and felt happy, content, and bit spiritual too. Then just strolled around in other galleries indifferently until lunch time.

The museum building itself gives a vibe of visiting the era in which it was built. It’s a museum of not just paintings and sculptures but of many types of arts over centuries. Taking those stairs, wandering the halls and passages becomes a journey through not only the centuries of pursuits of various generations of artists for expressions, and artistic liberations but also the shift in paradigms of European social norms, cultures and the tales of revolutions behind those shifts. Appreciating everything that the museum has to offer is a humongous task.

Although, my knowledge of arts since my visit to Louvre hasn’t changed significantly, I gained some insight into works of artists like Monet and Gaugin in the past couple of years. I came to appreciate delicate colors of romanticism in Claude Monet’s water lilies, erotic eccentricity in paintings of Salvador Dali, soft pastel harmony of colors used by Henri Rousseau and Paul Gauguin. In India, we have National Gallery of Modern Art in Jaipur House, housing paintings of Indian artists. I plan to visit that on my next trip to Delhi. And I hope that in future, I will find these museums lot more revealing and interesting!