The Louvre

The Louvre
A more-or-less forced march of four hours let me survey most, but not all, of the Louvre’s paintings on display and made me wonder how I had seen so much more on previous visits. I don’t know a better strategy, but there must be one.
I started with the Flemish and Dutch schools and spent more time there because I found the placards placed in occasional rooms to be of such interest. Two, in particular, debunked Caravaggism as a short-lived phenomenon – which is perhaps the same lesson one could draw from the Lacma/Wadsworth show. I was pleased to find two works by Joos van Craesbeeck, although neither resembled our painting and both attributions were acknowledged as shaky. David Teniers the Younger rose in my estimation, based on the consistency, and entertaining nature, of his many genre scenes.
The Rembrandt gallery had a great late and a very good early self-portrait and the former, mercifully, was not behind glass. Since my last visit, I am sure, almost all the eye-level paintings had been glazed – understandable given the traffic and futility, not to mention absence, of guards. Similarly unglazed were the great De la Tours. I was sorry that Mary Magdalen – once proclaimed to be my favorite painting – was away at Louvre Lens, but that allowed me more time for the mysterious Card Sharp. Why are the women’s faces such perfect blanks, while the male trickster has every wrinkle of his shadowed visage delineated? They appear to be painted by two different hands, and the other card player by a third. And whom is each looking at?
Most of the French galleries were skippable – and skipped – with the memorable works by LeNain and Philippe de Champaigne clustered in a temporary space (while safety stairwells are added) near the La Tours.
The Italians I remembered well, but I had to marvel at all the iconic works: Giotto, Fra Angelico, Botticelli, Mantegna, Raphael, Ghirlandaio, Titian, Veronese and, of course, Leonardo. Best was encountering the Concert Champetre, which was by Giorgione when I was in college but is now given to Titian. The two naked women, the panel explained, were an example of Giorgione’s practice of merging imaginary and real in the same scene: they represented, probably, Poetry and were the muses for the fully clad gentlemen who imagined them. This explained the puzzlement I felt two days before when viewing Manet’s Dejeuner sur l’Herber. Manet was riffing on, and updating, this famous painting from the Renaissance!
At the end of the Italian corridor, the Spanish paintings came as a relief. Once again, Goya stood out, as he had for me at the Frick last week. The more I see, or the older I get, the greater artist I feel Goya is.
I departed through the Grand Gallery, where I paid my compliments to the massive works by David, Gros, Delacroix and that toady Ary Scheffer. As much as I dismiss Delacroix based on numerous misbegotten smaller works, I must admit that his large productions are powerful and grand. My last look was saved for the Grand Odalisque, by Ingres. In its too-frequent reproduction, all one notices is the enormous naked back that curves in front of you. In person, I picked up the intriguing and beautifully painted objects around her, a pipe and ceramic stand (?) at her feet. As always, it pays to engage works of art in the flesh.