Paris 2: Louvre, d'Orsay, Pantheon

After Notre Dame, we had a tour up and down the Seine followed by supper in the Latin Quarter.  The next day we were up early (on advice) and headed for the Louvre.

The reason for going early was to avoid the crowds heading for the Mona Lisa.

 

So that worked well.

 In fact, the galleries were crowded all around the painting.

So we headed for a quieter, less famous Leonardo:

We had intended merely a quick whistlestop, 'smash and grab' raid on the Louvre, just a quick look at one or two famous old masters and out.  Instead we got seduced, and wandered around quite a number of galleries looking at stuff.  And such stuff!

But the other star of course, is the Louvre itself - particularly the new, underground spaces beneath the Pyramid - the connecting areas which pull it all together.  Absolutely marvellous.

After the Louvre we wandered through the Jardin des Tuileries...

...and then over the new footbridge (at least I don't recall it from last time) to my favourite art gallery - the Musée d'Orsay.  And I do mean the gallery of all those that I've been to that I love the most of all, anywhere.

It isn't just that it is housed in a refurbished and repurposed railway station (so much more romantic than Tate Modern's power station), nor the sumptuousness of the original building.  It is mostlly the art.  All those impressionists and post-impressionists.  Favourite Monets, Manets, Cezannes and Van Goghs.  Whistlers Mother (that isn't its real title).  Delacroix, Daumier, Rousseau, Millet (a new fave), Courbet, Renoir, more Monet, Pissarro, Caillebotte, Sisley, Degas, Berthe Morisot, Redon.  And Seurat, Signac, Toulouse-Lautrec, Gauguin, Bonnard, Vuillard, Klimt and Munch.  Aaaah.

However, the gallery was going through a major refurbishment and rehang when we were there (just finished  now, according to the Web site), so all of the most famous works - and very many of those I most wanted to see - were on temporary display.  ALL IN THE SAME CORRIDOR.  We had thought the Louvre was crowded, but that was nothing to the number of people in that corridor.

But I ignored them all and enjoyed myself hugely in my favourite arty space.  (Hence no photos).

The Panthéon was new to me: 

According to Wikipedia:

"It was originally built as a church dedicated to St. Genevieve and to house the reliquary châsse containing her relics but, after many changes, now functions as a secular mausoleum containing the remains of distinguished French citizens."

Which is fair enough, but doesn't really convey the overwhelming French Nationalism that pervades the state.  This is a cathedral to secular male Frenchness.  The state and its instruments.

 

The building is huge, and awesome in its own right.  The statues and other memorials scattered around it are large in themselves but can seem overwhelmed by the place.  We wandered and pondered.

 Diderot, famous for the Encyclopédie, ou dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers.

Apparently one of Foucault's first pendulums was originally set a-swinging in the Pantheon, although this is a replica.  The original bob he used then is at the the Musée des Arts et Métiers - as any reader of the Eco novel will (of course!) recall.

The latin apparently translates to "Christ tells the Gallic angel to guard the fate of the fatherland" - very much in keeping with the nationalistic and patriotic tone of the place.

 Georges Guynememer I believe, a WWI flying ace.

 Statue to the glory of "La Convention Nationale".

The author of The Little Prince.

And I've missed out all the others, like Voltaire, Victor Hugo, Carnot, Emile Zola, the Curies and Dumas pere.  Many of whom are buried in the crypt underneath.

So anyway, after that we wandered down to the Latin Quarter and had a cheap supper in a kebab shop... Very French!

Re-imagining the Medieval

The list of books on the right is not, of course, a set of recommendations; it merely records what I’ve read over the last year or so. And I am sure I’ve left some items out.

That is clearly of somewhat limited interest (others might be moved to substitute ‘no interest’); except for the fact that I sometimes feel moved to write about what I have been reading. As when, a few days ago, I commended Derek Jarman’s wonderful Modern Nature. At some point soon I will also be compelled to heap praise on Neal Stephenson’s Anathem.

Before that, however, I need to discuss a far more annoying book. The Time Traveller’s Guide to Medieval England: A Handbook for Visitors to the 14th Century (2009) by Ian Mortimer has received some very good reviews. On the front cover the critic Alison Weir calls it ‘Amazing’ while the back bristles with longer puffs from the Literary Review, the Telegraph and the Guardian – including one from the otherwise-marvellous Kathryn Hughes.

So why did I find it so annoying? Well, a little of my niggledness is caused by the extreme claims being made for his method. It is “(a) radical new approach (which) turns our entire understanding of history upside-down” according, again to the blurb. Well, no it isn’t. What the book does is perfectly OK – he tries to use historical materials (Mortimer is a professional historian) – to show what it would have been like to live in 14th Century England. His conceit is that you have travelled back in time to the period, so he can concentrate on those elements that seem truly different – those which would strike you most strongly (and which might get you into trouble if you got them wrong). He is happy to share the most unpleasant details (he begins with the idea that the stream near every village is called the Shitbrook), and some of his descriptions do seem quite vivid. But nothing more than that.

And every so often, despite quite a large apparatus of references and bibliography, he drops in a passage where his claims seem to be based on the purely imaginary.

For example, on p.247 while discussing how much quieter the medieval period is, he writes:

As a result of this comparative quiet, people listen differently. They hear with greater clarity. When a dog barks, they can recognize whose dog it is. They are more sensitive to voices. And above all else, they listen intently to music.

No supporting material, no evidence. Just pure assertion. Elsewhere he seems to me to mishandle his evidence. On p.91, in a section called “Greeting People” he provides a longish quotation from a French-English dialogue book containing a number of phrases to be used in greeting people. Here is some of it:

Sire, God give you good day
….
Fellow or friend, ye be welcome
What do ye? How is it with you? Where have ye been so long?
I have been long out of the country.
In what country?
Sire that should be overmuch for to tell, but if you please, anything that I may do, command it me as to him that gladly shall I do it.
Sire, grammercy of your courteous words and of your good will.
God reward you.

For Mortimer, this is taken as true and accurate and obvious. He seems to have little sense that this dialogue:

- might be an exhortation for people to do more than they normally do on meeting,
- that if true it may be notably class-based, or
- would not be used by those who knew each other well - who would not speak like this.

All of which to me seem possibilities. He takes it at face-value, and, I think, incorrectly as a result.

But the biggest problem I have with the book is that he neglects to mention an earlier attempt to put a modern-day reader ‘into’ the medieval mindset. C.S. Lewis’s The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature – his last published book.

Admittedly, Lewis is attempting something subtly different: he is attempting to capture the medieval ‘Model’ – the ideas, beliefs and cast of mind – that seem a given to medieval writers of all kinds – and by extension to the early modern period also. Mortimer’s focus is more on lived experience and the vernacular. But they are related, I feel, and Mortimer gives no indication that he knows the Lewis. A lacunae at the very least.

Lewis’s book is also unquestionably the better. Oh, it certainly has its own weaknesses. For Lewis, it is not necessary to describe Ptolemy’s Almagest “because a French translation exists”. He can write:

Plato’s Republic, as everyone knows, ends with an account of the after-life, put into the mouth of one Er the Armenion who had returned from the dead.

As everyone knows? His ideal elite imagined audience is not the same as Mortimer’s – and it may I think have dwindled somewhat since the early sixties. But although I don’t know my Plato, I still enjoy him.

And he can be truly marvelous. Speaking of the medieval picture of the heavens he writes:

These facts are in themselves curiosities of mediocre interest. They become valuable only in so far as they enable us to enter more fully into the consciousness of our ancestors by realizing how such a universe must have affected those who believed in it. The recipe for such realisation is not the study of books. You must go out on a starry night and walk about for half an hour trying to see the sky in terms of the old cosmology. Remember that you now have an absolute Up and Down. The Earth is really the centre, really the lowest place: movement to it from whatever direction is downward movement. As a modern, you located the stars at a great distance. For distance you must now substitute that very special, and far less abstract, sort of distance which we call height; height, which speaks immediately to our muscles and nerves. The Medieval Model is vertiginous. And the fact that the height of the stars in the medieval astronomy is very small compared with their distance in the modern, will turn out not to have the kind of importance you anticipated. For thought and imagination, ten million miles and a thousand million are much the same. Both can be conceived (that is, we can do sums with both) and neither can be imagined; and the more imagination we have the better we shall know this…. Hence to look out on the night sky with modern eyes is like looking out over a sea that fades away into mist, or looking about one in a trackless forest – trees forever and no horizon. To look up at the towering medieval universe is much more like looking at a great building.
(p.98-99)

And as we find out later, one that is very much inhabited.

OK, so Lewis also makes the bold unsupported assertion; his references are scanty; he’s writing for an elite. I disagree with some of his claims. And later on in the book, towards the end, he name checks Tolkien and science fiction, I think just because he can. But he is so much more fun than Mortimer, and he really does make his period come alive.

So if you've been reading the Mortimer book with anything like pleasure, fine. But do have a look at the Discarded Image - it truly is smashing.

Home Improvements

Rex omnibus ad quos etc. salutem. Sciatis quod de gratia nostra speciali concessimus et licentiam dedimus, quantum in nobis est, dilecto et fideli nostro Edwardo dalyngrigge chivaler, quod ipse mansum manerii sui de Bodyham, juxta mare in comitatu Sussex, muro de petra et calce firmare et kernellare, et castrum inde in defensionem partriae adjacentis et pro resistencia inimicorum nostrorum construere et facere, et mansum predictum sic firmatum et kernellatum et castrum inde sic factum tenere posit sibi et heredibus suis in perpetuum, sine impedimento nostri et heredum nostrorum aut ministrorum nostrorum quoruncunque. In cujus rei testimonium, Rex apud Westmonast. Xx die Octobris.

So there you go.
I want one of those.

As I wrote in the last post, Edward III gave Sir Edward Dalyngrigge permission to build the castle/manor house at Bodiam. This isn't strictly correct. What he did do was give the knight a License to Crenellate his existing manor house. That is what the latin above covers. Sir Edward interpreted this planning permission as providing the opportunity to build a brand new castle and manor somewhat nearer to the Rother. Possibly a little cheeky, I'm not sure.

Now, don't get me wrong, but I think it's a shame they don't issue these licences any more. OK, it would be a temptation for some of the posher Tory MPs and their expenses. But I was thinking that the licences could be democratised. Anyone could get one at the local post office, say. While we still have post offices. I'm sure our house would look better with some crinkly bits at the top.

(This is what the latin says, according to the guide book:
The King to all men to whom, etc. greeting. Know that of our special grace we have granted and given licence on behalf of ourselves and our heirs, so far as in us lies, to our beloved and faithful Edward Dalyngrigge Knight, that he may strengthen with a wall of stone and lime, and crenellate and may construct and make into a Castle his manor house of Bodyham, near the sea, in the County of Sussex, for the defence of the adjacent country, and the resistance to our enemies, and may hold his aforesaid house so strengthened and crenellated and made into a Castle for himself and his heirs for ever, without let or hindrance of ourselves or our heirs, or of any of our agents whatsoever. In witness of this, etc. The King at Westminster 20 October).