So the Louvre is indeed crammed with tourists, but if you avoid the obvious draws, or pay your respects to them and move on, there are some surprisingly spacious areas where you can walk slowly without accidentally wandering into the field of view of someone's camera (at least not too often). Getting there early and having a museum pass purchased ahead of time were also helpful.
Of the big three (the Venus de Milo, the Winged Victory of Samothrace, and the Mona Lisa), I had my heart set on seeing at least the first two, and I did. I happened on the Venus at a relatively quiet time and had the chance to walk slowly around and see how beautiful she is from all sides. One of my favorite memories is of a monk in brownish-yellow robes (I guessed he was a Buddhist) taking a picture of the Venus de Milo: multiculturalism at its finest.
Some of the things I enjoyed the most were not the ones everyone goes to see. When we came to the room that held the Mona Lisa, we decided it was not worth fighting the crowds to get close. (We wondered later how Leonardo had felt about that painting and if it was one of his favorites.) However, on the opposite wall of the same room but getting far less attention is a lovely huge canvas by Veronese, The Wedding at Cana; it depicts the wedding (at which Christ turned water into wine) as a huge Venetian banquet with many sumptuously dressed people in attendance (with Jesus sitting in the middle looking somewhat aloof). It was one of those where everywhere you look, you see some new detail to relish, so it was a pleasure to enjoy that in relative peace.
I saw many other noteworthy or lovely paintings, including the biggest one in the museum, The Coronation of Napoleon, by Jacques-Louis David. It's another crowd scene, this one of even more sumptuously dressed people attending the coronation of Napoleon as emperor. (I believe this is probably about the point at which Beethoven became disgusted with Napoleon, or at least is emblematic of why he did.)
One of my favorite parts of the visit was a trip down to the basement (the -1 floor, or entresol level) of the Sully Wing. I had read that you could walk along the former moat and view the foundations of the fortress built by Philippe Auguste in 1190. This was a fantastic sight, at least for a history nut. I love anything that lets me feel that I am in the presence of the past, and the base of the huge round stone tower did that splendidly. After this, I moved on to something that reminded me of just how recent the 12th century was, relatively speaking: the basalt stele on which is written in cuneiform the Law Code of Hammurabi. This is one of the earliest and certainly the most important compilation of legal code in the ancient Near East, and it was written in the 18th century B.C.E. Years ago in junior college, back when I was 16, I read about it in Western Civilization 101, and today I got to see it.
Yesterday while I was waiting in line at Notre Dame, I remember looking up at the tower and at all the gargoyles (no two alike, as far as I could see) that stuck out from the roof line, and feeling lifted out of my usual perspective. You live your life among people and their buildings and doings and you just accept that people are like this, they build things and do all kinds of strange things. But if you stop to think about the larger picture and look at humans as animals among others on this planet, sometimes you realize that as animals, we exhibit some very peculiar and interesting behaviors: Why would an animal do that? Why would an animal invest such huge amounts of resources in building this incredibly complex and beautiful thing? (I heard philosopher Daniel Dennett make a similar point once when he was arguing for the scientific study of religious behavior: if we saw any other animal doing the things we do in the name of religion, like gathering en masse at the Ganges at certain times of the year, we'd certainly want to investigate what that was all about.) I felt something similar at the Hammurabi stele today, only it was more like seeing a glimpse of the very beginning of how this unusual and fascinating animal tried to learn to live in large groups.
After all this history came lunch. I spent some pleasant time in the Tuilieries Gardens afterward and then an hour or two in the Musée de l'Orangerie, which features Impressionist and post-Impressionist paintings. I saw a lovely long room full of paintings by Renoir, but the high point of this museum was two long oval-shaped rooms containing paintings by Monet, one with paintings of of water-lilies and one with paintings of willows and water. He donated these paintings in this setting to the people of Paris so they would have a peaceful place to relax. They were among some of the most beautiful of Monet's paintings that I've ever seen, with subtle shimmering blues and greens. Maybe the sheer size of them helps; you can lose yourself in them. It was a fitting end to the day's museum visits.
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