La La Louvre

The Louvre is the kind of museum that scares me. At 60,600 m² it’s too big to walk even briskly through in one go, and it’s too crammed with riches — from the French crown jewels to Egyptian statues to, you know, the Venus de Milo — for any trip through its corridors to feel casual. The Louvre is packed with too much art from too many periods and too many cultures for anyone on earth to feel confident or even functionally knowledgeable on every floor, or even in every wing. It’s no friendly ex-train station or purpose-built color-coded art playground; the Louvre is a former palace with absolutely no proletarian airs. The Louvre is intimidating. And last Friday, I finally screwed up enough courage to take a knock at it.

The Australian, when she was here, introduced me to a friend of hers I’ll call the Australiman. A 6′3″ Brisbane-born rower-monarchist-law-student with designs on an art history master’s from Cambridge, the Australiman is a gentleman model. I don’t think I’ve ever seen him out of his sports coat, and it is precisely because of his generosity of spirit, wicked-fly dance moves, and easy sense of humour that I’m not the least bit jealous he’s on option for not one but two massive campaigns that would mean his face plastering billboards from L.A. to Lebanon. He deserves it.

Since the Australiman is about to take the Eurostar to interview for his next degree program, he’s been making regular pilgrimages to the Louvre, and finally convinced me to take a deep breath and cross the threshold.

Visiting museums with another person is a dicey enterprise: You have to have some of the same tastes so you don’t frustrate the hell out of each other (“Why has he stopped to examine all 253 paintings of fruit?”), but not mirror each other too perfectly for fear of mutual boredom (“OMG We R so like, Goya 4-eva!”). You have to have the same baseline museum walk speed — otherwise one of you is going to be wearing game face, lapping the Japanese tourists, and the other ambling along amiably, wondering at your hurry. And you have to have the same verbal inclinations. A talker is just as annoying to a non-talker in a museum as at the movies, and sticking next to someone who stays mute to your every conversational invitation is equally burdensome.

The Australiman and I proved to be well-matched on all fronts. He wanted to see the Egyptian collection, and knew plenty about 19th Century British art, which I don’t know anything about at all. I can normally find things to say about Ancient Greek mythology, religious narratives, and early Renaissance painting. So we learned as we traipsed — at a moderate, at-the-grocery-store-but-not-in-a-hurry-to-make-dinner speed — through Denon, Sully, and parts of Richelieu.

Fridays after 6 p.m., the Louvre is free to everyone under 26. I took this about halfway through the queue — but the buildings are so beautiful, I didn’t mind the wait. Plus there was a saxophonist busking away in one of the entry halls, and his music echoed around the courtyard, which was kind of eery and cool.

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This painting was a small oil study, which hung alongside a larger finished work. You can find every single hand and gesture practiced here in the final piece, and it’s impressive. But I thought there was something interesting about seeing all the multifarious arms reaching out from the blackness, too.

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Oyster or used condom?

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Oh, Mark Antony; what a world-class douche.

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Apparently, this 1548 painting by Jacopo Bassano is the first Western portrait ever painted of domesticated animals. You can see how the artist anthropomorphised his pets — they’re all lanky and mannered and have little, human eyes. To think it only took us 459 years to go from Bassano to this: