Paris – day no. 2
The first day in Paris featured several outdoor mini-concerts, the first at the Eiffel Tower, the second occurring among the swirl of an outdoor music festival organized by the French government. The rationale of our visit to France is the opportunity for performances by the Fox Valley Festival Chorus.
The often mention in the press that locations in Europe are over-touristed was brought home when we visited the Musée du Louvr. Catching sight of the long line of visitors waiting for admission to the museum made me grateful that our tour-guide had arranged in advance for a block of tickets. We were ushered into the Museum ahead of the long line. The announcement was made that entrance to the Louvre was closed at 3PM ahead of the preparations for the big outdoor music festival to be held on the grounds. This was to our advantage as the crowds in the exhibition halls diminished during our visit.
I will include a few photos taken in the Louvre Art Museum. Our guide, a man actually from the mid-west who found himself in Paris as a young man. Joshua was superb in his explanatory discourse on the various great works that we viewed. I liked him because his story telling was a reveal of his years of personal engagement (and love) with these works, and his conviction of the power of art to transform a persons life. As for myself two comments:
The Louvre museum is built over an old castle-fort intended to defend Paris against a possible attack my the English who had claim to Normandy at the time. I was fascinated by that some of the great stones carved to construct the castle walls in 1190, that featured a symbol of signature from a stone carver. In our time do you suppose the computer programmer roughly equivalent to that of the stone carver in the day of Philip II of France? “Good work if you can get it,” on both accounts.
And then standing close to the marble statue, the Venus de Milo, Aphrodite of Melos, I felt moved as if addressed by our ancestors, the 2nd Century BC Greeks. The marble speaks. If you visit Paris you must to visit the hall displaying ancient Greek sculpture at the Louvre. The Greeks knew something about the human form, male and female, having the potential to portray beauty and strength so ineffable that we cannot properly find words of description. The Greeks used rendering of the human form in marble to point to the divine, our human sense of transcendence.
