Deux jours au musée du Louvre

Our Paris cards were good for Sunday and Monday, and we decided to spend both days at the Louvre. I think we have now graduated to the class of hard-core museum-goers: less than a day would have seemed like torture, and less than two certainly painful. We had fortified ourselves the past couple weeks watching art history videos again, especially Richard Brettell's Museum Masterpieces: The Louvre, from The Great Courses. And, of course, we--especially Vicki--have been there before. Lots of times. So, accordingly, this will not be my first post on the Louvre. Others will have appeared in 2009 and 2012, some before that. For now, I'll try to stick to just a few personal favorites and a whole bunch of curiosities and out-takes, leaving the rest to Google Art.

Venus was still there but Sam
O'Thrace was away for renovation
or whatever; Delacroix's Liberty 
was back from Lens, as was the
marble Hermaphrodite...

David's sketch of General Bonaparte, 1796

Assassination of Marat: love these historical works that
themselves become historic

Millett; easy to see why Van Gogh (and others...Proust) liked his work

Ingres' study of hands for...

His Apotheosis of Homer, with its embedded portrait of Poussin; in a museum
of this size, you come to look for connections among the works, the artists, etc.,
sometimes leading you pretty far off the beaten track...

For example...on the ceiling somewhere, I noticed this interesting depiction
of a pope, an architect, an artist...Vicki immediately recognized Julius II,
which led us to see Bramante, Rafael, and, oh yes, Michaelangelo brooding
over there on the right; the plan for the church is not quite right, since
Bramante's St. Peter's was to be a Greek cross, not the cruciform depicted...
but I digress

I spent quite a bit of time, as before, sitting in front of
Watteau's enigmatic Pierrot; all the more enigmatic
considering what he mostly painted--happy elites in
happy times for elites, before the Deluge--somehow this
clown speaks to me; we are all clowns, and it's not always
fun; ecce homo

One of my other favorite paintings, Giorgione's Fete Champetre, also pretty
enigmatic, and also nested deeply in the history of art and the history of this
museum; they say Manet walked by the Fete Champetre daily...and came up
with Le déjeuner sur l'herbe

In the Claude Lorraine room; thinking of Turner...

Alas, I took half a dozen pix before I saw the "no fotos!" sign;
sorry; but, damn, he was good (and one of many artists copying
these two days)

Francois Premier (as John the Baptist), founder of the
Louvre and its first great collector (he collected Leonardo,
and therefore Leonardo's unsold works too)

Hubert Robert's 1796 depiction of the grand gallery; the Louvre and its
collections were now public property...

Not pictured department: apart from this Medieval Islamic glass, 300,000 other
artifacts; we spent a good deal of time looking at the antiquities, the objects of
art (household goods, as I call them), sculpture, etc.; as always, we were
transfixed by Van Eyck's Virgin and Chancellor Rolin and bowed before Durer's
first self-portrait...