We Go to Paris -- The Louvre

The streets of Paris are dark and deserted at 4:30 AM. The drunks we thought might still be carousing aren’t. It is quiet. It is, in fact, surreal. Shop windows are dark, their steel shutters rolled down. Streetlights are dim, just bright enough to keep us from falling off the curb. The very few other people out and about are giddy with their own adventures. As, indeed, are we. We have pre-dawn tickets to the Leonardo da Vinci exhibition at the Louvre, and we are on our way!

The Great Pyramid of The Louvre at 4:30 AM on a winter's day.

Thanks to a tip from a friend back home we’d learned that the Louvre was giving out 30,000 free tickets for the last few days of this exhibit, valid in specific time slots only between 9 PM and 9 AM. Paula immediately went on line, and soon had both our laptops and both our cell phones engaged in the task (needless to say, the servers were overwhelmed). And after some hours of frustration and disappointment, she came up with three tickets (“Do you want 5AM, or 5:30?” Ah, uh, 5 o’clock!). We contacted our American ex-pat friend Debra and she made us all reservations on the TGV (très grand vitesse, France’s high-speed train) that would get us to Paris in 3-1/2 hours.

Under the big top... er, pyramid. From inside looking up.

Christ and Saint Thomas: actually, by Andrea del Verrocchio, Leonardo's teacher. Impressive work and an ongoing inspiration for da Vinci.

I’ve never seriously considered da Vinci’s paintings; what I find exciting about his work are his machines, and the vision he had that was so far beyond what others of his time were thinking. What made his inventions fantastical and unworkable was the lack of a power source, not flaws in his ideas. But the Louvre is an art museum, and this exhibit was about his graphic works. Only 15 paintings of daVinci are known to exist; the Louvre had a full dozen of them for this exhibit, many borrowed from other museums—and even the Queen of England. (The most famous of his works, Mona Lisa, was still on permanent exhibition in its usual place upstairs; it wasn’t part of this special exhibit.)

The Last Supper; again, not by Leonardo--his version was a fresco which he changed so many times it didn't last. This painting by one of his students is considered to be the most accurate version of his original drawing.

A good part of the exhibition consisted of IR scans of the paintings. The generic explanation was that IR showed changes that the artist had made to the original work. While this stirred the engineer in me, there appeared to be no individual explanations relating the scans to the paintings, so I was never quite sure what I was looking at.

IR reflectogram of the lady herself. 

Still, it was thrilling to wander through the aisles and gaze upon these masterpieces, and appreciate the effort and expertise that this show represented. In addition to the dozen finished paintings there were sculptures, studies, sketches, and pages from the notebooks of this incredible “polymath.” We were greeted at the entrance by the larger-than-life Christ and Saint Thomas, cast in bronze, with incredibly detailed features. (While this statue was by Andrea del Verrocchio and not Leonardo, it was an ongoing inspiration to Leonardo, whose extensive studies  on how cloth drapes were used to great effect by Verrocchio.)

Pages from Leonardo's notebooks. Lower left shows an investigation of Pythagorean's theorem while the man on the right is an exploration of proportion in the human face.

Salvator Mundi, Savior of the World. Original on the left, IR scan on the right. Looks like Leonardo changed his mind about the cross on the globe.

The hair. Oh, the hair! Such fine, fine work (paintings; lower right a sculpted bust).

The Great Pyramid as we left just before 7AM...

             The Covered Passages of Paris

Of course, we didn’t just go to Paris for the one exhibition; we went a couple of days early, because there are no end of things to do and see in a big city, and especially Paris. We rented a place near the Louvre to ease our early-morning walk; something of particular interest in this area are the Parisian covered passages, forerunners to the modern indoor mall.

Entrance to, ah, oh yeah, the Passage Verdeau!

An elegant cafe in one of the Passages

Built in the 19^th century, they provided a respite from the often nasty weather in Paris, and an opportunity to escape from the muck and mud of 19^th century streets. Covered with classic wrought iron and glass ceilings, often paved with exquisite mosaics, they still offer an escape from nasty weather and the noise of the streets. Not only are the arcades themselves throwbacks to simpler times, many of the shops appear to be little changed in the last 100 years. All in all, great places to wander, eat, and maybe even shop!

Beautiful Belle epoch styling and vast skylights are hallmarks of the Passages.

Wolff et Descourtis in Galerie Vivienne, fashion accessories since... well, for a long time!

This book shop seems unchanged since the 1880s...

Of course, there are many fine things to see and do in Paris. Just walking is great! Even when we've been down the same street before, there is always something new to see... 

Eglise Saint-Ambroise as seen from Canal Saint-Martin during one of our strolls. Always something to see in Paris...

Up next: we're not done with Paris yet! More street strolling, and a visit to the Musee du Quai Branly...