Sunshine is becoming so rare here that when it does appear, I have learned to take advantage of it, while I have the chance. Yesterday was an absolutely beautiful day, so I decided to walk to the northern half of the 16th arrondissement, which took me most of the morning. In addition to seeing ordinary Parisian life and buildings (there are so many statues and churches in this town!), I walked past the Tour Montparnasse, a large, black, ugly skyscraper that has become quite iconic, through the Champ de Mars, famous for the massacre that took place there during the French Revolution (1791), and past the Tour Eiffel. Yes, now I've walked past it, and can go home and answer everyone's first question.
My first stop was a museum which Valerie had told me about, knowing my taste for castles and cathedrals: the Cite de l'architecture et du patrimoine is a museum dedicated to French architecture. The ground floor is a very long and exceptionally high-ceilinged hallway, full of full-sized plaster casts and scaled-down models of examples of religious, civil, and military architecture, arranged chronologically. The earliest pieces were the facades of Romanesque Longuedocien churches. Because architecture is so simple, these highly-ornate facades, which commonly featured assemblages of the vices and the virtues in a motif known as the "psychomache," were often the most decorative elements of a church. I made my way to the Gothic (introduced in France at Saint-Denis, which I visited several weeks ago, by the Abbe Suger in the mid-12th century), and was quite impressed by some of the models of the early cathedrals -- the transformation was quite quick, and although some of these Gothic churches possessed Romanesque elements, there was no real "transition phase," as far as I could notice. Such a church just might not have been able to support its weight, perhaps! Anyway, as I went along the Gothic, I saw a few reproductions of pieces whose originals I had visited, such as Notre-Dame de Chartres. Because this museum managed to reassemble so much statuary from so many different regions and epochs, it was easy to see certain trends. For instance, the garments of the statues of saints and apostles which often decorate the facades and porticoes become increasingly more complex, eventually draping over and over in a crazy fractal of unrealistic folds. Another trend is that the shape of the body becomes increasingly more evident as time progresses.
I eventually made my way into the 15th-century Burgundian examples of Gothic Flamboyant architecture, which most people can recognize without being able to name. Even though we refer to it as an architectural design, it's really a form of ornamentation; it is mostly just a superficial modification of the earlier Gothic style, steeper, pointier, with more tufts, etc. When I arrived at the Renaissance, I immediately recognized the Francois I spiral staircase from Blois: it's so iconic! The chronology stopped rather abruptly, and there was only a very small room for the 17th and 18th centuries. Had I not known that this was the era of Versailles, I would have thought that nothing important had been built in this era!
The upper stories of the museum are of a very different character than the ground floor, and are far less interesting. They contain more models, reproductions of famous wall paintings, and some uninteresting temporary exhibits. I saw a few interesting pieces, such as a facsimile of the plans for the Eiffel Tower, a to-scale model of the Bibliotheque Sainte-Genevieve (I had no idea it was so famous), a model of the beautiful Marseilles Cathedral (which I now wish to visit), and a beautiful model of the Palais du Trocadero, a majestic building built for the World's Fair, which no longer exists. There was also a fairly good description given of the Haussmanian transformations of Paris made under Napoleon III. On the whole, though, the museum is second-rate, and not even very good second-rate. Anything that it has which is interesting is a reproduction: nothing there is anything but a model.
It was only a quick walk from the Cite de l'Architecture to the Musee Guimet, the museum of Asian art (it's strategically located in the neighborhood of many of the southern, eastern, and southeast Asian embassies). I'll admit, I was a little bit hesitant to visit a museum dedicated to Asian art; not that I dislike Asian art, but seeing as I'm in Europe, there should be no better place to study Europe; so why study Asia? I only rationalized the trip to myself on the grounds that France had looted and stolen piles and piles of Vietnamese treasures, and so the legacy of colonialism was worth reporting.
The visit was perhaps the greatest breath of fresh air I have had in some time. The Musee Guimet, after the Louvre, I would say, is the best-curated art museum in Paris. Great care has been taken to present objects that are interesting, many of which have stories behind them (free audioguide). I only had about 90 minutes before the museum closed, and I decided that I absolutely needed to visit the Southeast Asian galleries, first of all because of France's relationship with Vietnam, and second of all because I have taken two Southeast Asian history courses, with the excellent Prof.s Tagliacozzo and Loos. In the Cambodian rooms, I saw a portrait-bust believed to be of Jayavarman VII, as well as a statue believed to be of his wife. Jayavarman VII is a notable ruler for many reasons; ruling as a contemporary of Henry II of England, Philippe-Auguste of France, and Saladin of Ayyubid Egypt, he rallied his country after a devastating military defeat in 1177, in which the Cambodian capital was sacked by the Chams. He instituted Buddhism in the kingdom of Cambodia, made great conquests, and established hundreds of charitable institutions throughout the kingdom. He also built on a monumental scale at his capital of Angkor Thom. It may or may not be a coincidence, but there seemed to be an awful lot of the Cambodian artifacts in the Musee Guimet seem to date from his rule.
There were also some nifty artifacts from Java, including Buddhist votive statues and Muslim funerary steles. This sounds like an unusual combination, and it is; when speaking of religion in Southeast Asia, one necessarily speaks of waves. Hinduism arrived first, perhaps brought by traders, or perhaps by groups of Brahmans (not necessarily mutually exclusive). Legends tell of Indian princes granted magical weapons, sailing east, and subduing local queens, whom they marry, founding new dynasties. The caste system never really caught on in the rigid way that it did in India, but there were still elements of it, Brahmans remaining as a powerful priestly presence for centuries. However, unlike in India, Brahmans had a lower status than the Kshatriya warrior-class. Buddhism, the first "world religion," arrived next, and was taken up, in one form or another, and somewhat slowly, throughout the various Southeast Asian lands. Vietnam is largely Mahayana Buddhist (relatively more "orthodox"), whereas the Buddhism of Burma, Thailand, Cambodia, Laos, and the Buddhist regions of Indonesia is Theravada (relatively more "fundamentalist"). Islam came later, followed relatively quickly by Christianity. Both religions spread extraordinary quickly; in the first half of the 17th century, one half of the 20-million-person population of Southeast Asia converted to either Christianity or Islam. Islam came from the west, by way of trade, and by way of itinerant Sufis. Quite often, sufis converted local populations by telling them that what they were already were doing was Islam, just performed imperfectly; local religious systems were thus changed only superficially, perhaps by the addition of the Five Pillars; local spirits and deities were renamed djinni, and life went on more or less as it always had before (it wasn't until the 19th century that Sumatra got all Wahhabi). The Spanish Jesuit priests who arrived from the east, by way of the Spanish Empire in South America, were somewhat less flexible, but the Catholicism which they brought to the Philippines was not nearly as brutal as what we imagine as occurring in South America. There was something of a friarocracy, and a feudal system of land distribution among monasteries; but there was an element of counter-reform humanism that motivated the priests to try to learn Tagalog, rather than enforcing Catalan upon the locals (although they had no choice when it came to certain words that formerly didn't exist in the Philippines).
But I digress. The most amazing thing I saw at the Musee Guimet was a 2500-year-old "Dong Son" drum from Vietnam. These bronze drums, associated with water spirits, were among the earliest artifacts from Vietnam, from the region's late Bronze Age (the Greek Bronze Age ended around 1200 B.C.E., for comparison, when violent upheavals caused a lack of trade to deprive them of the necessary materials for bronze forging). When the Chinese invaded Vietnam several centuries later, they destroyed the Dong Son drums, melting down the bronze, and recasting it as a martial horse, a kind of cultural attack on the traditional Vietnamese gods. I'm glad that they didn't get this one.
My only regrets? That I didn't get to play the Dong Son drum.
~JD
"Une gratification et une pension furent promises et parfois accordees aux familles comptant de dix a douze enfants" [A bonus and a stipend were promised and sometimes even awarded to families with ten to twelve children] (Jacques Mathieu, La Nouvelle-France: Les Francais en Amerique du Nord XVIe-XVIIIe siecle, p. 68).
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