LEONARDO DA VINCI EXHIBITION AND MY DAY AT THE LOUVRE by Armen Pandola
The Louvre is one of the world's greatest deals. When you purchase your tickets online to both the museum and the DaVinci Exhibition, you get change form a $20..
I arrived around lunchtime and had a zero (0) wait time - yes zero. So do a little planning and you will avoid the long lines.
The Louvre can be a little confusing - at the entrance the long lines are caused by the security check-in and there are separate, much shorter, lines for those with a ticket. Once you get pass that, you enter a very large space under the famous Pyramid. It is there that those who have not bought a ticket online have to get one - and yes, that line can be very long too, so buy online and you can avoid two waits that can be more than an hour long.
There are signs that will tell you where to go to get into the DaVinci Exhibition. The rest of the Louvre is divided into 3 sections: the Denon Wing, home to many of the best-known works of art such as the Mona Lisa and the Winged Victory of Samothrace; the Richelieu Wing, with its wonderful sculpture terraces and the apartments of Napoléon III; and the Sully Wing, best known for its antiquities and its focus on the history of the Louvre. If you go into one section and then back into the main hall, you will need your ticket to get into a different section - so keep you ticket in a safe place.
The Leonardo Da Vinci Exhibition at the Louvre is the most talked- about exhibit in the last 50 years. In the 1970s a world-wide exhibit of the Treasures of Tutankhamun became one of the first blockbuster exhibitions. Since then, there have been others, but none to gain the attention of the Da Vinci exhibition.
What is so special about this exhibit? The curator of the exhibit says that its purpose if to prove that Da Vinci was not someone “who lived a somewhat dispersed life, dabbling in mathematics, geometry, anatomy, and every now and again, painting." Rather, "His life was spent striving for the most perfect form of painting."
I don't know who the curator was talking about, but anyone who knows a paint brush from a toothbrush doesn't think that Da Vinci was a procrastinating failure. His legacy in actual paintings is slight - less than 15 works survive that can be safely attributed to him. But, looking at any one of these paintings will convince even a Neanderthal that Da Vinci was a master and a rare talent. Every one of his paintings seem alive - and that is something you notice when they are seen together with his drawings. He didn't just paint people, he painted people who were feeling something, doing something.
Of course, his most famous painting, the Mona Lisa, is a still portrait, but one of a woman about to smile or ending a smile. While her face is motionless, it appears to have been captured in the act of expressing an emotion - joy or pleasure. . You will not see the Mona Lisa in the exhibition, but it is in the Louvre in its usual place among the Italian painters of the Renaissance.
Lots of the exhibit is taken up with looking at infrared shots of the paintings. I mean, there are not many paintings and so you have to show something. These infrared shots enable us to examine how DaVinci went about painting his paintings; they show any erasures he may have made and, generally, how he painted. Remarkably, most of his works, including the Mona Lisa, show no corrections or false starts. From the initial drawing to the final painting. he painted with complete confidence in what he wanted to depict.
There are many drawings in the Exhibition. Many are of his writings - he was left-handed and wrote his notes 'backwards from right to left' so that what I just wrote appears in his notebooks as 'tfel ot thgir sdrawkcab.' Try it for yourself here.
The set-up of the Exhibition is not very user-friendly. For example, many of the drawings are in glass enclosures and are lined-up in long rows, forcing people to create a line that walks past them - a slow, long line. Also, many people walked up to the paintings and stood directly in front of them, very close, making it impossible for anyone else to see. Many people had the audio guide which talks about 10-20 % of the works on display and, of course, those works had many more people in front of them, but the organizers didn't take that into consideration. While all of this is annoying, it doesn't spoil the experience.
DaVinci was one of the last 'renaissance' men. Not only did he paint, sculpt, draw, engineer, build, write and philosophize, he was a scientist who often experimented to get at the truth. When you look at the breadth of his work in so many areas and disciplines, you understand that to be DaVinci was to be more than a painter, more than an artist - a genius who was unique in his mastery of examining the human condition.
After DaVinci, I wanted to look at something totally different so I visited the Louvre's great collection of Islamic art. This is something to see - some 3,000 objects are on display, spanning 1,300 years of history and three continents, from Spain to Southeast Asia.
From there, I went to the Italian Renaissance collection that includes the Mona Lisa and a score of other great paintings from Raphael to Titan. It is the greatest collection of Italian art outside the Vatican.
I ended my day with the art of ancient Greece and Rome, mostly sculpture. The Winged Victory is a thrill to experience and along with all the other great sculptures of ancient Greece, you can actually see the start of western civilization and art.
On a practical note, there are lots of places to stop and have a drink or a bite. Dotted around the museum are also many places to buy mementoes and depictions of the art you have just seen. Would you like a Mona Lisa magnet for your fridge? How about a set of coasters depicting the great sculpture of Ancient Greece? Maybe an old Dutch Master umbrella? My advice is to wait to the end of your visit to do this so you won't have to carry all that stuff around. There is a large 'boutique' at the exit and it has all the items that are in the mini-boutiques and more.
And that was my day - glad you could join me.