The Louvre

The Louvre is one of the biggest art museums in the world. It used to be a palace for one of the Louis Kings sometime in the 1700's. Because of that, it is absolutely gorgeous! On the outside there are tons of intricate and beautiful carvings. It must have taken forever to complete.

To get inside, you have to enter through a huge glass pyramid that is in the centre of this big courtyard. After having your bag checked, you take a series of escalators down under the pyramid and under the courtyard to where the beginning of the museum is. Beside that was a tinier glass pyramid.

The Louvre is a HUGE place. You get an impression of that from the outside, but you really understand that once your inside. There are like 6 different starting places to pick from! Like most of the other tourists (oddly lots of Japenese), we decided to seek out the Mona Lisa first.
First we went through the Italian section. There are tons of paintings of Mary and Jesus. I personally enjoy comparing where the artist places Mary vs. where the artist places the baby Jesus. I also like seeing the different kinds of halos the artist gives to them.

The Mona Lisa was surounded by a horde of tourists. Everyone was snapping photos at the famous painting. Wading to the front took a few minutes. It definately wasn't the biggest painting in the room.

The painting was covered by 2 layers of glass. I think that the first one is to prevent all the flashes from the cameras from harming the paint, and the second one is probably sensitive to weight so it could tell if the painting was being stolen.

The Egyption section had a lot of little figurines and quite a few stone pieces with hyloglyphs.

We were really trying to find the Greek section, which I thought would be paintings of the gods and stuff, but it turned out to be pieces of pottery from Ancient Greece. It was kinda cool, but I think that the room was cooler than the stuff in it. Since the Louvre used to be a Palace, there are amazing sculptured sides to all of the rooms. There are often murals of various gods on the ceiling all through the building. There were fabulous enamels and a ot of gold flaking stuff on many of the walls as well. The colour was still really quite bright too.

The artists from centuries ago believed that the body form was an art unto itself. Therefore in numerous paintings, there are naked women, or at least semi-naked women :p I wonder how mature my friends would have to be before they could walk through the entire Louvre...

In ancient times, athletes (all male) competed nude. They were thought to be brave and heroic and stuff, so all statues of God's were made in the nude as well because it was thought to be an honour. So we got to walk around a whole bunch of naked guys for an entire gallery! :D jk

In the sculpture section, there was another famous piece of art- the Venus de Milo.

Out of all of the other sculptures, I have no clue why that specific one so famous. Almost all of the female statues look kind of like the Venus de Milo. Right in front of her, was another Venus sculpture, only this time she had arms!

Alex and I Googled it, and it turnes out that it was made in like 100 B.C. and there was a huge war over it because it was considered to be one of the most beautiful pieces of art in the known world, and it was like a divine creation. Personally, I don't see what is so astounding about it.
During our whole day at the Louvre, we got an insane work out! The only way to get anywhere was to go up and down endless stairs! There must be over 100 stair cases in that place. Crazy.