The Louvre and Tuileries Garden

The Louvre is, well...overwhelming. It started out as a fortress on the Seine in the 1200's. In the mid 1400's, it became the royal residence for the kings of France. The Louvre was enlarged by all successive kings and remained their palace until things got politically sticky in Paris for Louis XIV. He built Versailles, moved the whole government out there, and set up a courtier system that basically reduced the power of the dukes and allowed him to increase his power and quiet the political unrest. The Louvre first converted to a museum after the French Revolution.

The Louvre is an enormous U-shaped structure. It is the second most frequently visited museum in the world. Only the Vatican receives more visitors each year. The Louvre collection was really started when Leonardo DaVinci relocated to Amboise France to the court of Francois I. Knowing the king was an art aficionado, he stuffed a couple of paintings into his saddlebags and rode a donkey over the alps. One of the paintings was of the wife of a merchant in Venice, Lisa Giaconda. Francois I fell in love with the painting and hung it in his collection. It still hangs in the Louvre as The Mona Lisa, now within a $5M special container and behind a glass wall.

In 1983, President Mitterand commissioned I. M. Pei to renovate the Louvre. He created a series of 3 glass pyramids, the largest of which is now the entrance to the museum.

 

The entrance pyramid from below.

The architecture of the Louvre is as beautiful and impressive as the collection it contains.

Sphinx, marble, 4200 pounds.

The Coronation of Napoleon by Jacques-Louis David, roughly 20 feet by 30 feet wide. The official title of the painting: "Consecration of the Emperor Napoleon I and Coronation of the Empress Josephine in the Cathedral of Notre Dame de Paris on 2 December 1804." Whew. Big egos, big paintings.

 

The famous Venus de Milo. Truly lovely to see in person.

 

From behind Venus, the hoard of tourists trying to get up close to take a picture.

The Wedding Feast at Cana, by Veronese. Where Jesus turned water into wine. Lots of paintings with religious themes.

 

The Three Graces.

There are 3 really impressive things about the Louvre: the building itself, the amazing collection it contains, and the unbelievable mass of people jostling through the building. Half our time was spent looking at objects, and the other half dodging tourists with cameras, many making a bee-line, almost running, toward a famous piece and stepping on feet or knocking each other with their backpacks. After 3 hours, we had to leave--we were exhausted by the people and overwhelmed by the amount of stuff on display.

The Tuileries Garden stretches from the open end of the U that is the Louvre building west. It was added to the palace in 1559 by Catherine de Medici after Henry II died of wounds from a jousting tournament. She leveled a tile factory ("tuilerie" in French) in the process and so the garden became known as The Tuileries. That's the Louvre in the distance. Cathy liked big gardens!

The fountain in The Tuileries Garden, now a popular public park. The obelisk in the distance is in the center of Place de Concorde.

Before he moved to Versailles, Louis IV enlarged the Tuileries and decorated with with many large sculptures.

Statue atop the gates at the end of The Tuileries Garden. The Place de Concorde is on the other side, and that turns into the Champs Elysee stretching to the Arc d'Triomphe.  If you look at a map of Paris, you see a geographic timeline of history from the former fortress/palace that is the Louvre on the east, along the Tuileries Garden to the west and the Place de Concorde (originally Place de la Revolution where the guillotine ran non-stop for a time), up the Champs Elysee past the former mansions of wealthy Parisians, ending at the Arc d'Triomphe that symbolized the reign of Napoleon I and the creation of the French Empire. Lots of history, and enough for today.