Hitting home

Today was a day of farewells.  It was my last workday, and I spent it tidying the papers that had accumulated around my workstation, perfecting (I hope) my presentation and uploading it in various forms, copying my data and summary reports to the LPQM external hard drive...and bidding farewell to Mélanie and to the students and other researchers.  Many thanks to all of them for helping me adjust and feel welcome, even though my stay was short and my grasp of French rather tenuous, especially at the beginning.  Mélanie, Clément, Silvia, Yijia, Iryna, Yi, Geraud, and all the rest...I hope we meet again someday.  It's a small world, right?  And a return to Cachan for me is not out of the question.  I hope.

Actually, there was one greeting amidst the farewells.  Steve (the REU coordinator) is here in Paris now, and stopped by Cachan in the afternoon.  So Mélanie and I gave him a quick tour of the lab, and they discussed some unexpected similarities between their own research.  An exchange of papers was promised.  But Steve will have to wait until tomorrow afternoon to hear about the results of my project.  I'm sure the suspense is very difficult to handle.

The evening brought yet another difficult parting.  I've visited the Louvre for the last time this summer.  Happily, Kierstin and I made it out to the museum a bit earlier than usual, so I had some extra time to visit all my favorite works as well as seeing some new things.  There are always new things.  This time we wandered through halls filled with vast tapestries and medieval artifacts.  Although I've maintained for a while now that the medieval art is generally not my favorite, the works in the Louvre are of very good quality, or so it seems to me with my two months of experience with other Paris museums.

Kierstin had to leave early, but I stayed until the museum closed.  I spent a while going through the Napoleon III apartments, which in all honesty I enjoyed much more than the Versailles palace.  No crowd, actual furnishings in the rooms, and a carefully-picked collection of masterworks to go along with the architecture - how could I complain?  By the way, here's a picture of the Crown Jewels (it's the mostly-white photo):

Then I looked through more of the medieval/Renaissance collection, the high point of which was my delighted discovery of three cases of old navigational instruments.

Throughout the evening, I had been stopping by and seeing my favorites again.  The statue courts in particular are some of the nicest places in the Louvre, with their high skylit ceilings and hushed tranquil atmosphere and, of course, incredible marble statues.  And with half an hour before the museum closed, I made my way back to the Ancient Egyptian galleries and spent my last minutes of summer-Louvre-time soaking up Egypt the same way I did the first time I visited the museum two months ago.  Coming full circle and all that.

All too soon the galleries began closing.  It hurt more than I expected to walk slowly through the halls and out to the lobby, looking up at the sunset through the glass pyramid for the last time...the last time for a while.  I am determined to return to Paris and to the Louvre.  This is just an intermission, not the end.  I'm determined.

While they're fresh in my head, I'll give a quick list of my favorite works in the Louvre, at least among the ones I saw.  I'm sure there are just as many that would make the list that I just never managed to find.   But anyway:

Statues

There are so very many exceptional statues that I have to talk about them first and also can't just pick one.  Praxiteles' Apollo Sauroktonos has a face that radiates peacefulness in every flowing line:

And I'm pretty sure that it's not actually possible to carve a sheer veil from marble, so I strongly suspect this sculptor of witchcraft:

Seriously, I still haven't figured out how it works, and I've stared at it several times.  I'm pretty sure this next one is Artemis on the hunt; she's lovely.

And even though parts of the work are pretty violent and morbid, the clasping hands of the dying warriors make me shiver every time I see them:

But if I had to pick just one statue of the ones I've seen here, it would have to be Atlanta tying her sandal in preparation for her race.  I discovered her tucked away in a corner just last week, and can't look at her without desperately wanting her to move, to finish her sandal-tying, to spring up and run - she's life caught in marble, a demonstration of the type of success to which every sculptor aspires.  Here she is:

A photo is such a poor way to express a statue, but it's all I can do.

Paintings

Claude Lorrain remains my favorite newly-discovered artist for his seascapes and sunsets.

And the room displaying Rubens' Medici Cycle is well worth pausing in for several minutes:

But the cake-taker in this category has to be (who else?) Renoir and his readers.  Oh Renoir.

It seems unfair to lump most of the museum's art into an "Other" category, but I'm running out of patience finding pictures anyway.  The door-guardians of some ancient Middle-Eastern city are stunningly stylized:

And of course the whole Ancient Egypt concourse leaves me reeling, the mummy-case room most of all.

I have been exceptionally fortunate to visit the Louvre so many times (seven by my count) this summer, and especially to have gotten in without paying every time.  So many treasures, so much of the best of humanity's efforts, all in one place - I've seen so much and could still return countless times without boredom.  Wait for me, Louvre.  Wait for my return.