Reviewing the Louvre Museum
I visited Paris in February 2008 , which now feels like a couple of lifetimes ago and I spent three glorious days there. I took a few days off from a work trip to Finland which was my first ever trip abroad and when I got to Paris, I could scarcely believe I was there.In spite of numerous trips abroad for work later, I never even had so much as a brief layover between flights in Paris — sepia tinting the memory of the visit more and more as the years went by.I never realized how badly I wanted to visit the Louvre till I got there — all those years spent dreaming of laying eyes on the Monalisa and internalizing the Da Vinci Code finally resulting in this moment.For a lover of all things Art and History like me, the first visit to a museum of world renown is always special.
I woke up with a tingling in the stomach for what the day had to offer.The weather was gloomy and drizzling-perfect weather for some serious indoor museum hopping.After a breakfast which consisted of me being bewildered by a Baguette for the first time , I walked out of BVJ Louvre and within five minutes was in the Palais Du Louvre which is a former royal palace and which houses the Musee du Louvre-the museum.A map of the palace/museum below:
I entered from the Richelieu side as I was expecting a crowd for the main entrance but I could only see a handful of people.As I walked into the main courtyard and was dazzled by the sight of the world famous Louvre Pyramid.It was lying quite symmetrically in the middle of the square and the contrast of encountering this piece of modernism in the middle of a Gothic then Baroque and then Neoclassical French Palace is quite breathtaking.Thank you I.M Pei. I had to pinch myself to realize that this was not a dream and I really was standing in front of the Louvre.
The Museum occupies most of the palace and is divided into three wings — Denon which has the ‘Grand Gallery’ — housing some famous Renaissance paintings and the Mona Lisa ; Sully which houses a huge collection of Ancient Egyptian art and Richelieu which houses the other important artifacts like the Code of Hammurabi.The Entrance to the museum is from beneath the glass pyramid and one takes a downward escalator to reach the basement and the ticket counter.Most tourists head for Denon to look / take pictures of themselves among one of the great collections of Renaissance paintings outside of Italy. My plan was to spend some part of the morning in Denon with a majority of the time earmarked for visiting the Sully wing to see the Egyptian collection leisurely and then go over to Richelieu to see the most important artifacts there.
I entered the Grand Galerie to take in the paintings. Considering that I had almost no knowledge or understanding of painting, I just followed the massive crowds to enter a room to the right of the Grand Galerie which houses the reason for most people to visit the Louvre : The Mona Lisa
The first thing that you notice about the Mona Lisa is that the painting is not as large as one always imagine it to be in photographs — it is placed in a normal sized frame inside a glass enclosure on a standalone wall.And I could see a lot of tourists being visibly disappointed with it, the painting is so hyped up in their imagination that they can’t help be a little dejected by it. Nevertheless, there was a great amount of jostling to get in front of it and since this was 2008, the era before the selfie camera, I was asked to take pictures numerous times. There were considerable number of Japanese tourists and at that time I was quite surprised to see them in Paris everywhere.I also posed in front of the Mona Lisa to have my picture taken and that picture is still my LinkedIn profile picture, even after ten years, as a reminder of thinner version of me.
Actually , the more interesting painting than the Mona Lisa is Paolo Veronese’s Wedding Feast at Cana which is this huge Renaissance painting right in front of the standalone wall where the Mona Lisa is placed. Its quite possibly the largest painting I have seen and has some very intricate details of wedding guests waiting for the next course ( left bottom), musicians with string instruments( at the center) and other such stuff.As per Christian theology, this is the wedding feast where Jesus turns water into wine.
The other painting which was really interesting was Liberty leading the people which is housed in one of the other wings adjacent to the Grand Galerie and is usually neglected by the crowds which throng the Denon wing and it makes for the quiet contemplative viewing which is impossible with the other paintings in the Grand Galerie. This Eugene Delacroix masterpiece is definitely an inspiring painting which depicts the din and chaos of a revolution at its height.
When you move forward towards the other end of Denon, you are greeted by the majesty which is the Winged Victory of Samothrace :
As one walks, one sees a lot of Greek and Roman sculpture, including the famous Aphrodite or Venus de Milo, who is probably more famous for her missing arm than for the actual sculpture.
By this time, I was conscious of time getting wasted negotiating the large crowds in Denon and decided to move immediately to the Sully wing. A somewhat disappointing yet unsurprising element of the Louvre is that all the signs for the exhibits are in French and only the most famous ones include English translations of these French descriptions. However , for more famous sections of the museum, there are information cards kept in stacks at one corner of the room which describe the exhibits in detail which is some solace for people who cant read French.These cards are in various languages including Korean, Japanese , Russian and others.Once I reached Sully, I decided to buy an audio guide which helped circumvent the problem of the French signs. Sully was a welcome relief after the crowds of Denon and there were very few visitors here.Most of these artifacts reached France during Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt in 1798 which were acquired/stolen under the guidance of Champollion the preeminent Egyptologist.The first thing you notice on entering this section is the Large Sphinx which is dated to be from 2000 BC and what follows is thirty rooms filled to the brim with fascinating Egyptian artifacts right from the Ancient Kingdom till the Byzantine era.It can actually be quite overwhelming if one is visiting for the first time and when compared to my visits to the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and the British Museum which have limited but important collections of Egyptian art.However, I was most excited to see the exhibits from Akhnetan’s era.While seeing them , It was really fascinating to think that this Pharaoh was the celebrated Tutankhamen’s father.
Afterwards, I decided to head to Richeliu to see the near Eastern Antiquities. This section was more interesting than the Denon wing as it contained the Code of Hammurabi — the famous Babylonian Code of Law — in its original form on a basalt Steele. I was quite thrilled to have physically laid eyes on something mentioned in school history books and this was the highlight of my visit to the Louvre. The Cuneiform on the steele is quite intricate and the top of steele depicts two figures — one standing and the other sitting, the sitting figure probably is Hammurabi.Some people refer to it as ‘the finger’ as it resembles a giant index finger . The other point to note is that the edict continues even on the back so every square centimeter of space has been utilized. After finishing the Babylonian section in Richeliu, I decided to come out of the museum after an exhausting but extremely enriching experience of visiting a museum…………..
To conclude, I will rate the visit to the Louvre on a rating system which rates museums along several different parameters which are as follows.I look at historical importance of exhibits , how expensive is the entry fee, how well placed is the museum inside the city and whether its accessible by public transport, etc. , how accessible are the museum exhibits in case the local language is one other than English, how good is the souvenir store within the museum and most importantly , how general is the museum — in terms of being interesting to people of different fields of interest and not one narrow niche where a rating of 1 is highly specific ( Hi, to the oddly specific Italian Futurism exhibit in the Guggenheim, NYC ) and a rating of 10 covers everything from History , art, sculpture , pop culture etc.
Historical Importance and Quality of Artifacts — 10/ 10
Reasonableness of the Entrance fee — 8 / 10
Accessibility within the city — 9 / 10
Accessibility of additional information about the exhibits — 6 / 10
Specificity Score ( 1 — extremely narrow subject matter to 10 — General History ) — 9 / 10
Museum Store variety — 8 / 10
Overall Score — 50/ 60
Rating Scale
49 -60 World Class Museum
45–49 Excellent Museum
40–45 Good Regional or Topical Museum
30–40 Average Museum
Less than 30 — Not worth Visiting
