The Inaccurate Tourist

9. La Joconde

The weekend started with a visit to Evry, which is a new city in the suburbs of Paris. It is connected the city by the RER. Most of the buildings in this area were modern, including the Cathedrale d'Evry. This building is in the shape of a cylinder 29 metres across. The roof is cut at an angle and decorated with trees. The metal "scaffolding" coming out from under the central cross is actually a set of bells.

The official website says that there are more than 800,000 hand-placed bricks on the exterior and interior of the cathedral -- the precise placement of these bricks is easily apparent from the inside. I took a bit of video inside the Cathedral, which is very interesting acoustically and aesthetically, but I couldn't get a picture that captured the vast space inside.

Sunday, however, I managed to get into the Louvre with Antonio and Anna. The Louvre is free on the first Sunday of every month (saving five or six euros). I thought it would be extremely crowded, but the only real congestion was at the coat check and at La Joconde. In fact, there was a bit of oddness at the coat check -- they really stretched the definition of "coat check" when they refused to take my Roots Canada (TM) jacket or my (empty) backpack. However, I can't really complain -- it's a free service to museum patrons (and tipping is forbidden).

The Louvre is incredibly large. If you only have an afternoon to spend, you have to plan your day around the areas that interest you. I will fortunately have the opportunity to return the to Louvre again and again (and I will), so we decided to start at the top (French painters through history) and spend the afternoon there, and then go to see some of the more famous pieces in the museum, such as La Joconde.

I can't claim to be an expert on French paintings, but the names were all there -- from Eustache Le Sueur to Eugène Delacroix. If I didn't know who they were before, I know now. Although some of the more valuable and fragile paintings are behind glass, most of them are just hanging on a wall. You are even allowed to take photos as long as you don't use a flash -- a rule that was generally ignored. In fact, I took plenty of pictures of the paintings (without a flash), but I'm going to leave them off the website.

In my (limited) experience, an exhibition at a Canadian museum generally has one or two headliners -- a Renoir, Manet, Rembrandt, Degas, van Gogh -- a BIG NAME (or 'Monet-shot' if you will) that even I can recognize. I can wander around the museum and appreciate what I see, but at the end of the day I can say that I saw a BIG NAME painting.

The Louvre is nearly entirely BIG NAME art with all of the above and Michelangelo, Goya, Raphaello, Titian, Van Eyck, Rubens, Vermeer, that guy that makes the faces out of fruit and of course, Leonardo da Vinci. In a gallery of big names, his is one of the biggest for a single reason - La Joconde.

Imagine da Vinci in 1506, in front of a wood panel, using all his ability to paint the portrait of an enigmatic, smiling woman. He paints her so that her expression changes as you watch her, and as she watches you. His attention to detail and mastery of the art creates a window. Hundreds of years later, the painting has become so famous that it's always surrounded by a crowd of people. To preserve it from the thousands of flash photos taken every hour, it has been covered by a thick box of grey glass. The crowd of people stare through the grey window and memorize the details of the smiling woman, and a man to the side captures them on his camera. I take a picture of this man.

I've been deliberately coy up to now, but the words "enigmatic" and "smiling" give it away -- if you didn't already know, La Joconde is the name of the painting that I would normally call the Mona Lisa. You've seen it a thousand times in advertisements and posters, but I've left the picture off the web site, because it really is an experience to see it live, despite the Heisenberg-esque distraction of all those other pesky observers.

If you feel the need to see the Mona Lisa again, however, you can find it here.

Instead of ringing a bell and yelling "everybody out!", they close the Louvre room by room, slowly herding the patrons towards the exit. Unfortunately, I encountered this phenomenon in the Italian sculpture area. We left the Michelangelo sculptures to go find the Venus de Milo, and the doors closed one by one until we were back at the coat check.

We took a walk around the area, where I took this picture of some modern Parisian art -- big reflecting balls in a fountain. I liked the way the lights were reflected, and if you look carefully, you can see me in there as well. We were killing a bit of time so that we would arrive at the theatre in time to see a play: Meutre à la Soleil Vert, the tragi-comic story of multiple mysterious murders in a clinic. It was an extremely tiny theatre -- I think the stage was larger than the audience. It wasn't Molière this time, and the French used a lot of slang. Nevertheless, I understood most of the story and most of the nuances, except the ending which had to be explained to me afterwards.

This week, I managed to obtain my medical certificate so I could get insurance in order to subscribe to the diving club and therefore practice in the pool. I wasn't able to take my level one exam (which is the introductory level) this week, however, but I had some excellent snorkelling instruction from an experienced gentleman.

Let me know whether you think I should buy a Habitrail system and some white mice. What should I name them? Your stories about the Louvre or BIG NAMES or Art are welcome as well.

Posted by The Inaccurate Tourist at March 8, 2002 12:00 PM