Wanderings: January 2024

Saturday, January 20, 2024

A winter's day in Paris

January 20, 2024

Tickets to the Louvre were readily available a day ahead of time. We had a nice walk along the river in the chilly morning air (1). The Louvre was originally built in 1190 as a fortress with a moat fed by the Seine. Converted unto a royal residence in 1364, the galleries were constructed beginning in 1595. The Palace was converted into a museum in 1791, early in the revolutionary period.

Unlike the Vatican Museums, one can wander more freely among the collections at the Louvre. The Mona Lisa is among the notable paintings here. The painting is behind glass, and the crowd taking selfies is kept about 5 feet back from the painting. As with the Vatican Museum, there was also an Egyptian collection at the Louvre.

Wandering through the galleries, we noted that virtually every painting before about 1600 had an overtly religious theme. Particularly striking to me were painting which seemed to glow with the artist's use of color.

After dinner, we grabbed some bikes from the Velib bike share system. The road on the left bank/south side of the Seine has a good bike path, and we rode a few miles downriver to the Eiffel Tower in the bracing night air.

(1) 25° F is quite cold for Paris

The Seine at Ile de la Cité

Bellini's St. Anthony, the founder of monasticism.

The blue robe was very vibrant, c. 1450

Sign at the Mona Lisa.

There is a crush of people taking selfies in front of the painting, which is behind a pane of glass

Coronation of Josephine, Empress of Napoleon

The altar boys looked less than fully enthused at the coronation. Detail of coronation painting.

Stefano di Giovanni (Sassetta), The Blessed Ranieri Frees the Poor from a Florentine Jail, 1437 - 1444. The saint is on a cloud, but it looks like a jet pack to me.

Giovanni Francesco Barbieri aka Le Guerchin (1591-1666) - Saint Pierre pleurant devant la Vierge, 1647. Not in the Bible that Peter and Mary commiserated after the crucifiction, but plausible.

Intricate, tiny vase ~1 1/2 inches

The ceiling in the café had tiles with what appeared to be nuclear fallout symbols

The raising of Lazarus, François-Auguste Biard, c. 1480

The Monkey Antiquarian - Jean-Baptiste Siméon Chardin (mid 1700s)

The Monkey Painter - Jean-Baptiste Siméon Chardin (mid 1700s)

Claude-Joseph Vernet, Seaport in the moonlight. The painting almost glowed.

I turned a corner and exclaimed "Oh, Wow!" when I saw this painting. Magdalenefjorden, Spitsbergen. François-Auguste Biard, 1849. The color was striking.

Gypsum figure, c. 7000 B.C.E. One of the oldest items at the Louvre

Baked clay bookkeeping records from Sumeria

Toy soldiers to accompany the dead of ancient Egypt

Sacred Egyptian cat, scarab on head

Venus de Milo, found in the 1820s

The Louvre was originally a moated fortress, and you can walk along the bottom of the moat in the museum's basement.

Mosaics

Depiction of Mecca on tile (c. 1650) in the Louvre's recently-added (2012) Islamic Art collection.

Sunset, Ile de la Cité

Moonrise over Notre Dame

Heading home, Sunday morning

Weak winter sun at Keflavik, Iceland (64° North lattitude), where we changed planes. The temperature was 28°F at Paris, Keflavik, and Boston.

The Vatican Museums

January 19, 2024

Guided tours were not available today, but a ticket for the Vatican Museum at a convenient time was available on-line. We arrived early to mail some postcards with Vatican city stamps; no joy there, the post office was on the other side of a barricade (1). We lingered in the square in the warm sunshine until our museum entry time.

The museum entry is through the thick walls on the north side of the Vatican. The crowds are funneled through the museum generally in one direction. The museums are arranged in rough chronological order, beginning with the Vatican's Egyptian collection, although the Sistene chapel (1600s) comes after the modest 20th and 21th century items.

The Egyptian and Roman collections seem designed to highlight how the church has superceded these epochs, and perhaps drawn upon their legacy.

Sucessive popes have added to the collections, with some naming wings after themselves. There is a whole room devoted to the declaration of the Immaculate Conception as official Church Dogma in 1854 (2), with a fresco depicting Pope Pius IX proclaiming the doctrine.

A corridor has a series of well-preserved Flemish Tapestries from the 1500s depicting scenes from Jesus' life (3). I was eager to see the Hall of maps which came next; cartographic history fascinates me. I was disappointed to discover that the hall is just full of detailed maps of Italy, all painted on the walls in the 1600s (4).

The highlight of the Museums visit were the rooms containing frescoes (5) painted by Raphael in the high Renaissance. The most famous of these (a scene of which is depicted on the museum tickets), is the School of Athens, which places Greek philosophers and Chuch fathers together in conversation and debate. I tarried in this room for a while. On an adjacent wall, Raphael has depicted a bishop who was skeptical of trans-substantiation (6) being convinced when the eucharistic begins to bleed.

The Sistene Chapel is near the end of the tour (no pictures are allowed). Wooden benches are arrayed around the edges with cantered head rests to facilitate viewing of the famous ceiling paiпtings. Michelangelo's most famous painting is on the ceiling: God's finger reaching out to Adam's finger to give him life. Perhaps it was the noisy crowds or the ubiquity of the image, but it did not make that strong an impression on me.

After a late lunch, we headed to Fiumicino airport for our evening flight to Paris-Orly.

(1) A motorcade came through carrying someone important. The Italian police escorts veered off just outside Vatican City limits (a). The Swiss Guard (b) is the police authority at the Vatican.

(a) Vatican city being its own country (i), the Italian police lack jurisdiction within.

(i) The smallest in the world, with sovereign territory measured in acres, and the shortest state railway, with 980 feet of track.

(b) Generally from the Italian-speaking region of Ticino in Switzerland. Like the country itself, the Swiss guards were valued for their neutrality in the ever-changing series of alliances among the Italian city-states, principalities, and republics, including the Papal States (centered in Rome) over which the Popes exercised temporal power.

(2) The notion that Mary was conceived without original sin, thus having an appropriately pristine womb in which to carry Jesus. I was surprised that the doctrine (and the obligation to attend Mass on the Feast of the Immaculate Conception (December 8)) was so recent.

(3) For some reason, more tapestries present the massacre of the innocents than any orher event. According to Luke, King Herod (trying to prevent a rival claimant his throne) had all young boys in Judea killed. Having had advance notice from an angel, Jesus was safely hiding in Egypt at the time.

(4) To my surprise, the room was not climate controlled, with fresh air flowing through open windows. While pleasant on a mid 60s° F day, I'm not sure how the varying temperature and humidity might affect the painted maps.

(5) The audio guide explained that frescoes (unlike other murals) are painted on fresh stucco, so that the paint and stucco dry together, making a more stable bond. This is a lengthy process, with only small patches of stucco installed at a single time.

(6) The doctrine that the Eucharistic host and wine actually become the body and blood of Jesus during consecration at a Mass, and are not merely symbolic.

St. Peter's Basilica

Reconstruction of boat found in the Sea of Galilee

Statue of the Egyptian Goddess Sekhmet

Centaur mosaic

Arhena mosaic

Discus thrower

Tapestry: Jesus' birth

Tapestry: Jesus emerging from the tomb

Tapestry: Jesus ascends to heaven

Raphael's The School of Athrns

Euclid teaching geometry. Detail from the School of Athens

Pope Pius IX proclaiming the Immaculate Conception dogna in 1854.

Thursday, January 18, 2024

The Colleseum and Palatine Hill

January 18, 2024

The trams were not running near the coliseum, so we walked over. Tickets were available for immediate entry (1). The coliseum, dating from the second century C.E., held events featuring executions, wild animal hunting, and gladiator fights. Many popes in subsequent centuries affixed plaques honoring themselves in the venue (2).

The coliseum could hold 60,000 spectators. Each ticket had an individual seat assignment. This was well before the printing press (1400s) and automatic sequential numbering (late 1700s). Must have taken a lot of people and time to create 60,000 tickets.

There were stories that the stadium could be filled with water for mock sea battles. Modern hydraulic engineers were skeptical, but found that the coliseum could be filled with enough water to float ships in about 15 minutes, and drained just as quickly (https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/video/colosseum-roman-death-trap/).

Next to the coliseum is the Palatine (3) Hill, upon which Rome was founded. The hill contains a random mixture of structures from antiquity and later ecclesiastical buildings, including papal gardens. Looking down on a series of fountains, music from the 18th century was playing (rather incongruously). The hill overlooks the forum, a center of Roam life in antiquity.

The Pantheon lies in the center of Rome. The structure is both an ancient temple and a functioning Basilica. The last two Italian kings were buried here (4). A group of honor guards stands vigil at the tombs of Kings Vitorrio Emanuelle II and Umberto.

Our hotel was right next to the Rone Opera House. I bought a seat in the rafters for Mozart's opera The Magic Flute. The venue was beautiful and rhe performance was well done, but I think Mozart is overrrated.

(1) It's not summertime. While waiting in line at the ticket booth, the touts were quite persistent that we would have to wait hours unless we paid them for their services.

(2) Typically bearing the name, the abbreviation P.M. (a) and a date.

(a) Pontifus Maximux: greatest bridge builder (between the people and god).

(3) The English word "palace" and related words (e.g., "palatial") derive from the presence of the ruling classes on the hill.

(4) Somewhat surprising, as the pope was less than pleased at being denied his temporal authoriry over the papal states upon Italian unification in the 1860s.