Interiors, Part One

If you're not into art, this might be a good day to go get a cup of coffee instead.

We activated our four-day Paris Museum Pass today, which means that today through Saturday we'll be overdosing on museums.  Today we started with the Ile de la Cité, which is the downstream island in the middle of the Seine that in the really early days constituted Paris itself.

(Side Note: its sister island, Ile St. Louis, suffered a devastating fire last night.  Hotel Lambert, a historical building, was seriously damaged while being restored.  It tells you something about this city's values when the news report gave the name of the building architect before reporting any other facts about the building.)

Ste. Chapelle was built by St. Louis, aka Louis IX, king from 1226 to 1270.  He acquired what he believed to be Christ's crown of thorns and needed a proper chapel to house them.  He had a relatively small chapel of just enough stone to support some incredible stained glass.  The glass is under restoration, and the photo opportunities were limited, but perhaps this rose window captures the idea for you.  (The four "card suit" panes in white are just the random play of light through the windows.)



Since the chapel was private for the king's use, its location adjacent to the king's residence is not surprising.  The business manager for the residence was the "concierge", and his quarters were known as the Conciergerie.  Eventually the kings found better quarters and the old complex was repurposed
as the center of judicial administration, a role it plays today.  The Conciergerie itself became a prison and was the last stopping point for Marie Antoinette and  about 1200 victims of "The Terror" following the revolution in 1789.  Besides the prison it included a large room (at left) for the "Men at Arms" (Gens d'Armes, from which it is easy to get gendarmes).

From the Conciergerie about a block's walk away is Notre Dame.  Whereas Ste. Chapelle is beautiful in the same way that a dew-bejeweled spider web is beautiful, Notre Dame is beautiful in the same way that Niagara Falls is beautiful.  The main thing that links them together is stained glass, and the finest stained glass in most gothic cathedrals is in the rose windows.  I'm still hoping for a good opportunity to make it up into one of the bell towers and get closeups of the gargoyles for you.  But today, we had bigger fish to fry.  The Louvre was waiting.

My friend told me that there were two things worth seeing at the Louvre: Winged Victory and the Mona Lisa.  I will spare you both of those, except for this view of why the Mona Lisa does not photograph well:

That's her just right of center.  The crowd reminds me of a rock concert, but instead of holding their Bic lighters up, everyone is holding up their cameras, trying to get a shot to remind them of their courage.  Moving on...

The Louvre is awash with art, and not all of it at eye level.  Consider the ceilings:

And like any halfway decent museum, it has temporary exhibits.  Scattered throughout the wing we visited today were the works of a contemporary artist, Michelangelo Pistoletto.  He seems to specialize in using mirrors, probably to include the viewer in his work.  But this one caught my eye:

I think we should have a naming contest.  His nomination is "Venus with Rags", where the old clothes are intended to represent things that devalue with time and the marble Venus represents timeless beauty.  How about instead calling it something like "Don't you just hate wash day?"