I'm the Victorian-looking guy at the top, just left from center. Actually my picture's on the back. Our year-long memberships cost less than our memberships at the Met (thank you, France!), and they come with great perks. Of course we can visit the museum as much and as often as we like, but we also never have to pay or wait in line for special exhibits, and we never have to wait in line to get into the museum. Our elite point of access is tucked away in here:
After receiving our membership cards we were told emphatically, "Visitez le Raphael," so that's what we did! The Raphael exhibit, which closed the day after we saw it, featured the largest collection of moveable works by the artist ever presented. And it was awesome. The exhibit followed the growing trend of interest in the members of the great masters' workshops and in their creative process, from sources of inspiration through studies, sketches, and drawings to the final piece. We recently saw a similar exhibit of Bernini clay models at the Met. Such exhibits are proof that the greatest works of art don't just spring fully formed from the masters' heads like Athena from the head of Zeus, but are the result of an arduous process of trial and error, as the artists try to work out the best solution to the problem posed by the work. The reason they're masters is that their solution really is the best.
(not our pictures)
Raphael's painting of St. Cecilia (patron saint of music) and its accompanying sketch by a member of his workshop give a nice example of what I'm talking about. Whereas the figures accompanying St. Cecilia (St. Paul, St. John, St. Augustine, and St. Mary Magdalene) are isolated and disconnected in the sketch, in the painting they belong together, as if they had just been having a conversation. And you're drawn into that conversation much more dynamically by the outward gaze of St. Mary in the painting's foreground than by the similar gaze of St. John in the sketch's background. The light coming in from the right side of the painting leads your eyes immediately from St. Mary's gaze down her side, and both her bent leg and bent arm join with the organ to sweep your eyes up toward St. Cecilia's face at center. Of course St. Cecilia's upturned eyes lead you to consider the heavenly choir, which she contemplates ecstatically, but you're also helped along upward by St. Augustine's crozier, which is completely absent from the sketch. The most striking iconographical change from the sketch to the painting, I think, is the depiction of the heavenly choir without any instruments. The broken instruments gathered at the saints' feet then make a far more dramatic statement: not only is the heavenly song better than the earthly one, it's of a radically different kind. I could go on and on about this painting, which has been a favorite of mine for a long time. How great to finally see it in person!
On our second visit to the Louvre we started exploring the permanent collection, which is dauntingly vast. We began with Greek and Roman sculpture (Venus de Milo! Wow! Nike of Samothrace! Wow!), and had just scratched the surface of Italian painting before we left. I was completely blown away by this coronation by Fra Angelico, another of my favorite painters:
(not our picture)
This picture doesn't do the painting justice. The whole thing radiates light. The steps up to the throne glow ethereally in rainbow-colored marble. Perhaps only second to the Bernini sculptures in the Villa Borghese in Rome, this was certainly the most beautiful thing I have ever seen in my life. I stood there looking at it for about twenty minutes straight. We also got to see a well known triumph of St. Thomas Aquinas, a handful of paintings and frescoes by Boticelli, another favorite, and of course the Mona Lisa, behind bullet-proof glass, a wooden rail, a nylon rope, four guards, and a horde of tourists wielding cameras of all sorts. On the whole I have been shocked by how visitors to the Louvre behave. Shocked.
After our visits to the Louvre we usually walk across the Seine into the left bank, crossing the Pont des Arts. This bridge is tres romantique, since it's covered on all sides with locks left by lovers who carve their initials on a lock, lock it to the bridge, and then throw the key into the river.
Luckily we don't have crazy initials, so it was easy enough to find a lock with ours on it. Ah, l'amour!
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