You may remember hearing that the Seine River flooded a few months ago. Because of this, the Musée de Louvre was closed during our first few days in Paris, which meant we couldn’t visit it until our last full day in the city.
Before hitting the museum, Marie and Taylor and I started the day with pastries again because Paris. (White bread is basically protein there.) We took the metro to the Louvre and met up with our friend James at an adjacent Starbucks. (This would be our real fuel for the day.) James was one of our good friends from Asbury and just happened to be in Paris briefly after touring Turkey and Iraq and Italy and I can’t even remember where else. (Let’s just say he got questioned at U.S. Customs when he returned.) It was perfect timing to meet up with him.
Exploring the Louvre
Here are some tips for going to the Louvre:
- Finish your Starbucks before you attempt to enter. For some reason, the curators don’t want any coffee stains on their ancient, priceless art. When my Starbucks was spotted, I had to get out of line and chug it.
- Use the downstairs entrance (the one from the metro). It’s approximately a thousand times faster than the main entrance through the famous glass pyramid. Thanks, Marie, for the insider knowledge yet again.
Though the Louvre has been a museum for more than 200 years, it had previous lives as a fortress, a castle, and a palace. Its initial construction began in the 12th century, and it played home to the kings of France on and off until they moved to the Palace of Versailles.
These days it plays home to artwork. We saw pieces by Michelangelo and Da Vinci and Delacroix. We saw colossal ones like the Wedding at Cana and diminutive ones like the Mona Lisa. And we saw lots and lots of sculptures (and paintings) of naked people.
To see a human body carved out of marble is amazing. The detail is unreal, by which I mean it is very real indeed. The skin, the toes, the leg muscles and back muscles, the belly buttons — everything is accurate. It looks as though someone poured liquid marble onto an actual human — that seems more believable than that each groove and ripple was carved out of stone.
And I know this probably isn’t the takeaway you’re supposed to have when you go to the Louvre, but what struck me most about all the artwork we saw there was not just the lifelikeness of the sculptures, but the shapes of their bodies, the females in particular.
Granted, I see mostly naked female bodies more than I would like. I am assaulted by images of them whenever I walk past Victoria’s Secret or stand in the Kroger checkout line or get the #%$& mail. [There’s a certain wave of feminism whose adherents would criticize me for saying I am assaulted by female bodies, but I prefer the wave that calls these particular images what they are: exploitation, objectification, a body as a product, an unattainable ideal, a singular standard created by marketers and played upon by pornographers, all of whom are selling you not just stuff but ideologies, and inconsistent ones at that. (That’s a rant for another day.)]
I hate them, and yet, oh, I want to look like them. I have found the best thing to do when I see images like that is look away. Let your eyes linger on the perfect stomach in the Victoria’s Secret window, and you’ll inevitably start regretting the soft pretzel you ate in the food court 15 minutes ago. It’s better just to grant yourself (and her, perhaps) the dignity of looking away.
But if you go to the Louvre, you should look at the bodies — because these bodies don’t look like those ubiquitous ones, though they are familiar in their own way. If these bodies had brains in their marble heads, brains accustomed to 21st-century standards, they’d likely feel they needed to lose 20 pounds. And it isn’t just their thickness that defies modern expectations — it is their proportions themselves. These sculptures wouldn’t just need to lose weight in 2016; they’d need to remedy their very ratios somehow — they’d need narrower hips, flatter stomachs, bigger this, and smaller that. Not because the artist made a mistake, of course, but because the artist depicted bodies as they actually are, sans Photoshop.
I wish every girl who’s ever thought her ratios were wrong could stand in the Louvre, in one of the many sculpture rooms, and realize that all of the bodies up on the pedestals looked like hers. And I wish she could feel, like I did that day, that perhaps her proportions weren’t wrong at all. Perhaps they were carefully carved, formed by skillful hands, worthy of display in the world’s most famous museum, lauded for ages.
If they let you eat soft pretzels in the Louvre and you were munching on one as you looked up at a sculpture and marveled at the marble, you’d almost certainly think, “This pretzel looks pretty good on me.”
[In case you’re wondering, the male sculptures’ bodies were far less fascinating to me. They look exactly like the 2016 standards for males, which is not to say that male body standards do not exist, only to say that they appear to have been roughly the same for the past few thousand years. I’m under no delusions that men can’t also feel intense pressure to meet cultural beauty standards — in fact, I’ve taken those standards to task on this blog before — but I do find it interesting that we still compare men’s bodies to those of Greek gods (“He had the body of Adonis!”), but not women’s. I assume that’s because the 2016 standards for women are so over the top that not even a god could meet them.]
Playing Parisians
Anthony Bourdain-approved
We could’ve spent multiple days perusing the Louvre, but with limited time left, we decided to do something we hadn’t yet done: spend an afternoon relaxing. We lunched at Le Verre Volé, which Marie informed us was a favorite of Anthony Bourdain, then hit up another boulangerie for treats to eat on the canal. (If you’re keeping track, yes, this was my third treat of the day.)
That afternoon at the canal was one of my favorite memories from our time in France. We’d been going-going-going all week (which is the way to do Paris for sure — there’s so much to see — but still tiring), so it was nice to slow our pace for a few hours. I felt like an actual Parisian that afternoon — eating more white bread, dangling my feet over the canal, taking my time at life.