Today we went to the Louvre. Where do I start? I took so many photos I exhausted the camera battery. So I'll create two sections to make it manageable. This first section will be about the basics and the building itself. You could spend a full day just looking at the website Musee du Louvre
The main entrance is under the pyramid, which was commissioned by Francois Mitterand in 1984. The museum is open every day except Tuesday, from 9am until 10pm. Entrance price is 10 euros ($13.50 AUD) with lots of concessions available such as our Museum Pass. Entry is free for under-18's, job seekers and disabled persons plus their carer. Free services include coat and bag check, wheelchairs and child-strollers.
If you buy your ticket in advance (very easy, from multiple sites all over the city) you don't need to queue for entry under the pyramid. You use another entry and walk straight through.
Here is the stunning entrance/exit pyramid and the queue, together with the seven triangular, and very shallow fountains.
Same view from a slightly different position on the first floor balcony where we had coffee.
One of the five covered courtyards in the Louvre. These were originally open courtyards in the French style. Imagine men on horses here when this was a castle or palace - before it was an art gallery and museum. The whole roof is glass; the light is amazing; the silence is eerie.
Here is the glass roof. We think these roofs were added in the mid 1800's.
But the internal terraces of the courtyards were redeveloped in the 1980's as demonstrated by this stainless steel handrail, inset into the stone.
The upper terrace of the same internal sculpture courtyard.
The museum is so big that it is managed by means of three different wings. As you move between the wings you must pass through this area under the glass pyramid called the Napoleon Hall.
There is only one exit for the whole museum and it is up either the stairs on the right or the escalator on the left. The red "thing" on the plinth is a sculpture from the current sculpture exhibition.
We had to walk down this gallery to get to the section we wanted to visit. It is one of the older parts of the building - around 1650. It is all marble and stone. At the very end is a huge staircase. These staircases, and often elevators, mark changes in levels as the building was added to or changed over many hundreds of years.
Here is the staircase ... looking upwards ...
... and here it is looking downwards ...
... and here at the top is the Winged Victory of Samothrace.
And this is the Grand Gallery, built in the mid 1600's when the Louvre became a museum. The floor is parquetry, the columns are marble and the roof is glass. It is in this gallery that all of the grand Italian and French paintings reside.
Looking out the windows of the Grand Gallery, this is the view from one side of the Louvre to the other. The Louvre is a very, very long U shape, so the entry pyramid is in the inner section of the U, and this green and watery roundabout is in the outer section of the U. You can see four quite distinct sections of the building with different building styles, different floor levels, different roof-lines and built hundreds of years apart. The unifying thing is the stone. It is almost the same throughout.
... continuing along the Grand Gallery ... it is VERY long ...
......and at the end it connects to an older section, commissioned by Louis X, who was keen on painted ceilings and a lot of gold. On reflection, that could have been Francis X
or even Jean-Pierre X ....... my French history isn't what it used to be (and neither is my memory of what I read today).
Part 2 coming up.
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