Visiting the Dutch

It was a perfect day to spend indoors, at the Louvre, looking at Dutch paintings: cold, dreary, wet, and miserable. At least there aren't any dikes to overflow, here in Paris. On my way, I finally stopped by the large domed building which I pass every day on my way to the Sorbonne, having finally decided that I ought to figure out exactly what it was. It turns out that it is the Val-de-Grace church, equipped with a benedictine monastery. The founder of Val-de-Grace is none other than Anne of Austria, wife of Louis XIII, who founded the monastery in thanks for the birth of a son (guess who that was). When Louis XIV was seven years old, he laid the first foundation stone of the edifice: the AA motif on the walls still recalls the original patroness. Mass was in session at the time, but the church is open to visitors most days of the week, and moreover, has become the museum of military health.

In any case, I had agreed to meet up with Nick later that afternoon, to visit the galleries of the Louvre together, but I had about three hours to spend alone with the Dutch paintings. I had told myself ahead of time that I was only going to look at paintings I enjoyed, but I nevertheless stopped to look at the 15th- and 16th-century religious paintings and portraits of dead important people. One of them, van Eyck's "The Virgin of Chancellor Rolin," from 1444, was apparently quite famous. It depicts Philippe le Bon (comte de Bourgogne) kneeling and praying before the Madonna: it's the background, depicting a sort of heavenly cityscape of Jerusalem, that makes the piece so famous, I think. However, for a while, there really isn't anything in these earlier Dutch paintings that interests me. But it's around 1580 that you begin to see some of the detail, such as the grime under Saint-Jerome's fingernails, that makes the Dutch paintings so interesting to look at. Beggars appear in certain compositions, and war makes its appearance as destructive brutality, alongside more glorious images. This is the age of the early Brueghels, a multi-generational clan of painters. I saw Jan "Velvet" Brueghel's masterpiece, depicting one of the battles of Alexander the Great; however, I far preferred a four-part series depicting the essences of the four classical elements. I particularly liked looking at "Fire," a scene of dwarven blacksmiths hard at work underground; in the foreground are piles of the masterpieces which they have crafted: suits of armor, metal urns, tools, jewelry, etc. This is one of the wonderful aspects of Dutch paintings: the piles of stuff which often clutter their foregrounds! I often wonder how they painted many of these, such as "Fish Merchants at their Stall." Did they paint from real models, or from books, or out of their heads? I wonder exactly how anatomically correct all of these fishy wares are...

In any case, I quickly got into the Rubens, the Van Dyck, and their contemporaries. There was even a double portrait of the two Dutch masters, isn't that neat? Perhaps my favorite part of this section was the Hall of the Medicis. Marie de' Medici, the wife of Henri IV, commissioned a 24-piece series of paintings chronicling her life's story, which now take up the entire hallway. To us, the idea seems ridiculously egotistic, and even laughable; at the time, though, it must have been a grand series of paintings. The story begins before her birth, showing the Fates spinning out her destiny, and different episodes include her marriage, coronation, reception of the regency when Henri IV leaves for war in Germany, her acceptance of the regency upon his untimely death, her diplomatic missions, etc. The episodes are highly romanticized -- one canvas doesn't even contain any human beings, only the classical Greco-Roman gods deciding the destiny of France and Spain. At the end of the epic, I was more impressed with Rubens than with Marie de' Medici!

Eventually, I arrived at the section on Rembrandt and his circle -- only to find that I really don't like the Rembrandt selection at the Louvre. Now that I've seen the original "The Night Watch" in Amsterdam, perhaps my standards are too high, but there was really only one painting that really impressed me, a 1660 self-portrait titled "Portrait of the artist with an easel." It has that truly Rembrandt je-ne-sais-quoi to it; half of the painting is obscured in shadow, and it is the way that the visible part emerges that makes it so wonderful to admire. Around this time, I looked at my watch, and realized that I only had a little while left in the galleries before I met Nick. I sped up, and made it at last to the final Dutch room, where I found the work of my other favorite Dutch painter, Vermeer. The Louvre owns two Vermeer paintings; one of them, the iconic "Lacemaker," is currently on loan in Philadelphia. The other, "The Astronomer, or rather the Astrologer," painted in 1668, is less well-known, but no less beautiful. It has light shining in through the window; what could be better? The folds of the tablecloth, the details of the globe, the sketches on the book before the scholar: all are detailed and accurate. Scholars now think that it is likely that Vermeer used a device known as a camera obscura, lent to him (?) by his friend Van Leeuwenhoek (yes, the same guy we learned about in Bio glass when learning the history of the microscope), which allowed him to trace his subjects. Perhaps this is true, I don't know; however, if Vermeer owed the quality of his work exclusively to a camera obscura, why can't anyone else paint like him? Camera obscura or not, Vermeer will never cease to interest me (fun fact: according to Wikipedia, the subject of "The Astronomer" could be Van Leeuwenhoek, who might even have commissioned the painting).

I headed outside into the light drizzle, and Nick found me while I was in the middle of taking the picture of a newly-engaged couple, who had asked me to take a photograph of them in front of the glass pyramid (very common). He and I bopped around the the 17th- and 18th- century French sculptures, before heading over to the Mesopotamian and Iranian antiquities. We found the famous Code of Hammurabi, one of the western world's most ancient of legal documents, and also a stele of "Baal of the Lightning," one of the Mesopotamian gods who features prominently in the Tanakh. Sitting down for a moment, I happened to look at some Iranian pottery, dating from around 1200 B.C.E. -- only to notice the very same aspects found in "Orientalizing" Greek pottery! The connection is now so obvious; the stylized flower blossoms interspersed with rows of stylized animals in profiles is clearly the same! I always knew that "Orientalizing" indicated eastern influence, but I had never before seen any examples of that eastern influence; now I have.

We meandered through the French painting section. We saw the famous "Turkish Bath" painting my Indres, which represents quite well the Ottoman harem in the European mind (note: when we think "harem," the image we conjure up of naked empty-headed hedonistic beauties surrounded by fierce eunuchs is that of the late Ottoman harem; a "harem," in, say, Middle Kingdom Egypt, was a completely different institution). The painter was 82 when he finished this work, which seems a little old, to me, to still be obsessed with naked women. That's the job of people my age, isn't it? We moved on, and Nick pointed out the only Impressionist paintings in the entire Louvre; there are only about eight of them, with a Monet and a Renoir, as well as a few Pissaro. The collections of the Louvre are just too old, for the most part, to have any significant possessions later than the mid-19th century. We also saw an extremely eye-catching 1780 painting of "The Eruption of Vesuvius" by an Austrian artist, and we kept on running into more portraits and busts of Diderot. Near the end of the visit, we came across a computer monitor that showed us how art historians analyzed paintings, using a portrait of Madame de Pompadour as a model. We both realized that, as much as we enjoy looking at certain paintings, we're never going to be able to read a painting like that. Good grief, those art historians even read the titles of the books on the shelves, and pick out complimentary shades of blue in completely different parts of the painting!

So, I'm all done with my work. Time to hit up the museums while I still can! Mom and Dad arrived yesterday, and we met for dinner; today, we visited the Musee Carnavalet together; and tomorrow, when they return from Versailles, we're eating dinner again together.

~JD


"L’Etat fixe les prix et les cours de la monnaie, achète la production, contrôle la circulation des biens et des hommes" [The state fixed the prices and the weights of the coinage, purchased finished goods, and regulated the circulation of goods and of men] (Jacques Mathieu, La Nouvelle-France, p. 150).