Beautifully Disturbed at the Louvre

Friday was Louvre day. Feeling both tired and excited, I organized myself for a day of walking and observing.

The Louvre is huge. It was around seven times bigger than I was expecting it to be and it was stuffed with around one hundred thirty-eight times the number of people I expected. There are four levels, each with three wings in the shape of a U. Each wing is organized into departments or sections by descent, for example: Greek Antiques, Arts of Islam, Italian Paintings, etc.

It sounds pretty straightforward, but don’t let that fool you. When you’re in such a large place, with so much art to look at, all while maneuvering through the thousands of people, all speaking different languages…it can be overwhelming. At one point, I was even unsure of what floor I was on. Plus it was disgustingly humid and reeked of body odor. But no worries, I wouldn’t have traded this day for anything else!

Our assignment was to locate and interpret eight specific pieces of French art from the past 150 years, focusing on two of our choice more intensely. Finding the pieces wasn’t actually as difficult as I expected it to be (thank goodness for Alia!). Luckily for me, most people in the area surrounding the pieces I was looking at were focused on the Mona Lisa nearby, leaving my pieces a lot less crowded and a lot less smelly.

The first piece that I would like to talk about is the sculpture titled “Winged Victory of Samothrace”. It stands 9 feet tall and is made of paros marble. It was discovered in 1863 and is thought to depict the ancient Greek goddess of victory, Nike, perched on the prow of a ship after battle.

You might be wondering why this womanly figure is missing both arms and a head. The answer is that these pieces, with the exception of the right hand and some fingers, have yet to be discover, though the search goes on. Head and arms or not, in my opinion this was the most beautiful and most expressive sculpture that I saw the whole day (a close second being "Psyche Revived by Cupid's Kiss" shown below). 

The second piece I would like to talk about is “La Grande Odalisque” by Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres. This is one of the pieces that we had talked about in class just a few days prior to my Louvre visit. In class we talked about Ingres’s tendency to exaggerate the form of the female body, as seen in the tiny head, elastic arms and legs, and ridiculously long back and pelvis area of the woman depicted in the painting. As an anatomy student, I had to wonder about her lumbar vertebrae. You’re only supposed to have five, but she has double that, ten total. I’m not even joking there is a scientific article to support this (which is actually hilarious).

“Measurements were performed in normal young women and in the painting. The figure in the painting displays several anatomical landmarks—the protruding spinous process of the seventh cervical vertebra (C7), the dimples over the posterior superior iliac spines, and the lower margin of the buttocks. These landmarks were used to define two regions—the back and the pelvis—which could be measured and related to head height.” (lulz)

Take a look for yourself: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1079534/

 Anyway, this picture is obviously a bit scandalous, (a little girl near me in the museum made a grossed-out kind of face after looking at it and covered her eyes, it was adorable) and was criticized heavily when first revealed in 1814. Disregarding anatomical realism was unpopular and even discouraged at the time. But aside from thinking that this piece is a little bit silly, that is particularly what I love about this piece. Ingres was a very talented painter. You can tell by his rendering of the fabrics that the woman is laying on, by the detail in the feather fan she hold, her face, and her turban-looking headpiece. He made her body look this way because he wanted to, not because he didn’t know how to make her look more anatomically correct. And that is something I love.

The final piece I am going to talk about is my free choice, meaning it was not one of the assigned paintings, just a piece in the museum that I found to be interesting. I chose a piece called “The Young Martyr” by Paul Delaroche. I actually went to this painting twice, but could not get a great picture because of the glare of light from the window that was near it. Because of the glare, the first time I saw it, I didn’t notice the halo circled around the woman’s head. It wasn’t until the second time, when I looked at it from a different perspective, that I noticed it. The picture shown below is an image I found on the internet because I wanted you to be able to see this important feature.

This piece was incredibly emotional for me. The use of dark colors everywhere except for her skin makes her glow in the still waters where she obviously drown just moments before. In my opinion, the only way to describe this piece is beautifully disturbing. I wanted immediately to know the story behind the girl and was secretly hoping for some extravagant story or behind the scenes into her life story. After extensively researching this piece, I found out that it was completely a year before Delaroche’s death in 1856 and is a depiction the sacrifice of a young Christian girl into the Tiber River of Italy.

And that was about it.

I was surprised that there was not more of a story. One interpreter did mention that this piece might resemble Shakespeare’s character Ophelia in Hamlet because both characters drown. Another mentioned that this might have been Delaroche’s response to the death of his wife, Louise Vernet, in 1845. Either way, this piece stirs up strong emotion in its viewers and is nevertheless beautiful.