Artwork – Sarah Richter Photography

It just didn’t seem right to write a blog post about The Louvre without mentioning the Mona Lisa, so I decided that this painting needed its very own post.

We arrived at The Louvre just after it opened and made a beeline to the Mona Lisa. The museum gets more crowded throughout the day, and the Mona Lisa is the main-attraction, so we wanted to go ahead and get that out of the way. Given how crowded the Mona Lisa Room was when we arrived, I’m glad that we didn’t wait until later in the day to see it.

Leonardo da Vinci painted the Mona Lisa between 1503 and 1506 (while living in Florence), though several people believe that he continued working on it as late as 1517 (while he lived in Ambois). The Mona Lisa is an oil painting on a white, Lombardy poplar panel. Though much mystery used to surround the painting, it seems to be fairly well accepted that the Mona Lisa is a portrait of Lisa del Giocondo, a member of the Florence & Tuscany-based Gherardini family. Her husband was Francesco del Giocondo, a Florentine silk merchant. The Mona Lisa is currently valued at $782 million USD.

Seeing the Mona Lisa without a huge crowd present just wasn’t a possibility, so I decided to embrace the craziness and tried to take pictures that captured the experience of seeing the Mona Lisa along with hundreds of other tourists.

When you enter the Mona Lisa Room, this is what you see. There are several other paintings in the room, but we didn’t take time to see them because there were too many people in this room for our liking.

After you wade through some of the people, you’re able to get a glimpse of the Mona Lisa. I thought that this photograph of someone taking a picture of the Mona Lisa with an iPhone would be a fun picture to look back on in 30 – 50 years (will iPhones still be around then?)!

A few people, like me, still use stand-alone cameras to take pictures. Notice the lady on the right-side of the photo taking a selfie with the Mona Lisa. I’m always amazed at the amount of people taking selfies with artwork. To each, his (or her) own.

I tried to be polite and spent several minutes waiting for a clear path to the front of the group of people staring at the Mona Lisa, but it became evident that manners weren’t going to get me very far. Sooooo…I gave up and started acting like everyone else and pushed my way to the front so that I could get an unobstructed photograph. They don’t let you anywhere close to the painting, so this was the best I could get.

Mona Lisa
by Leonardo da Vinci
1503 – 1506, oil on white poplar panel

After I managed to get out-of and away-from the crowd, I snapped this photo of people viewing the Mona Lisa. Not exactly the calm, serene, life-altering experience one would hope for while viewing the most popular painting in the world.

The painting across from the Mona Lisa is The Wedding at Cana (1563) by Paolo Veronese. It is the biggest painting in The Louvre. This painting depicts the New Testament wedding during which Jesus performed His first miracle by turning water to wine. The painting hung in the refectory of a Benedictine monastery in Venice for 253 years at which point it was stolen by Napoleon (in 1797) and shipped to Paris. The painting measures 21.8 ft by 32.5 ft.

I took one last shot of the crowd and the Mona Lisa before we (gladly) vacated the Mona Lisa Room.

I’ve been debating whether or not to write a post about our visit to The Louvre. I have to admit, I’m struggling with whether or not a post consisting solely of photographs of artwork will be interesting. In the end, I decided to start off with photographs of statues. Statues seem to photograph better than paintings…maybe because they’re three dimensional…or maybe because I have a soft spot for statues. How sculptors can take something rock-solid and turn it into something that looks flowing and full of life is beyond me.

The Louvre is HUGE, and I’m honestly not sure how many hours we spent there. We purchased our tickets ahead of time, which allowed us to wait in a shorter line than the normal line. We had a general game plan as far as the things that we knew we had to see — The Mona Lisa, Winged Victory, and Venus de Milo. It was a rather short list because I’m not terribly familiar with artwork from the time period featured at The Louvre. I read several different “10 Things You Must See at The Louvre” articles before our trip, and most of the items in those lists didn’t really interest me.

I’m fairly detail-oriented, so in addition to taking photographs that show entire statues, I also like to take up-close photographs of certain portions/parts of the statue that caught my attention. I think this love of and appreciation for detail is part of what fuels my interest in statues. The building that houses The Louvre is visible in the background of several of photographs in this post — be sure to take in the beauty of the building itself!

Disclaimer: Nearly all of the information placards accompanying art on display in The Louvre are entirely in French. I did my best to correctly identify the titles, authors, materials, and time period of each of the statues showcased in this post.

Here is a link to an Imgur photo album containing all of the photos in this post.

Winged Victory of Samothrace
by Pythokritos of Lindos
2nd Century B.C., marble