Compost Studios

We’re surprised with good weather on the day we’ve set aside for exploring the Louvre. Our walk to the museum takes us through a textile and garment district, and E-Grrrl and I are wowed by the fabrics and fashions brightening the store windows. The sun is low and highlighting all the beauty of the architecture in the second arrondissement. As we wind our way through narrow streets toward Rue du Louvre, I stop frequently to take photos. A red door. A huge mural of tulips. A charming café with a broad awning. The ornate frieze on a government building. Click. Click. Click.

When we walk through an archway and into the courtyard that is at the center of the Louvre, I’m absolutely blown away. It’s stunning. Magnificent. Bathed in golden light, the Louvre is perhaps France ’s greatest treasure. We enter through the huge glass pyramid, into the most remarkable art museum I have ever encountered.

The Louvre, a former royal palace, is art in itself. Floors of inlaid marble and walls of carved stone. The gold leaf and fancy plaster ceilings. Domes, arches, columns, and vaults—every aspect of architectural detail imaginable. Frescos, murals, painted ceilings, ornate brick, and medieval stone are all a fitting backdrop to some of the best and most recognizable art created through the ages.

There’s the Venus de Milo, the Mona Lisa, La Grande Odalisque, the Coronation of Napoleon, Liberty Leading the People, Victory, and Wedding at Cana .

I lose track of time surrounded by all the dreamy madonnas, children, gods and goddesses of the Italian renaissance period. Botticelli is the master of this state of bliss. With colors that are soft and brilliant at the same time, his paintings exude a heavenly luminosity. I laugh at the thought that he is the original airbrush artist—idealizing women’s skin and beauty as well as any modern Adobe PhotoShop master. His subjects have round stomachs and full thighs and suddenly the extra ten pounds I’m carrying seems luxurious and beautiful and not jiggly and loathsome.

I stare with awe at the crown jewels of Louis XV, the diamond and pearl earrings of the Empress Josephine, her diamond and emerald tiara. E-Grrrl and I marvel over the cases and cases of decorative enamel boxes, many encrusted with shells and jewels. I wonder at about the secret lives of the patrician women with round children and flushed cheeks.

Some rooms vibrate with the drama and heroism of historic battles and revolutions. Other rooms are studies in religion. Roman and Greek mythology depicted in a world beyond our own, scenes from the life of Christ, tranquil madonnas, holy martyrs, icons of every variety--idealized forms from across the ages.

What if Jesus was an endomorph—fat, short and bald? What if Mary had bad teeth and acne scars? Undoubtedly they were not the fair-haired, pale-skinned Europeans the paintings and statues revere. They are nearly always depicted as both physically perfect and serene, as if they never wrestled with grief, exhaustion, and doubt. Where is the humanity touching the divine? It strikes me how these forms and images handed down through time are entrenched in our subconscious, how art both reflects and creates reality on so many levels.

The Mona Lisa attracts crowds like a rock star, and her soulful eyes seem to meet the gaze of every face in the room. I love her long Italian nose and am less enamored with her dingy complexion. Her décolletage is the only part of the painting that catches the light and displays some mysterious luminosity. Maybe behind her coy smile is the knowledge that Da Vinci is staring at her breasts, not her face. Maybe her husband wanted him to.

Mona Lisa’s luminous cleavage is just another reminder that this is a man’s world. Drifting from one masterpiece to another, I wonder about the women who could only be the girlfriends, wives, subjects, or patrons of artists and not artists themselves.

What would the world have looked like if women had the power of the pen, the paint, the palette, and the pencil in their hands? What would women have created with chisel and stone, brush and canvas? How would they have colored the world of art and history? What would be imprinted in our subconscious if they had been allowed to be artists and not art? We’ll never know.

When I see Michelangelo’s slave rebelling against both his human bondage and the block of stone he’s emerging from, I think of all the women through the ages who were silenced and corseted and placed on pedestals to be traded and admired, whose worth was determined by the men they married and served, the children they produced. How far we’ve come and how far we have to go to be truly free and a force to be reckoned with in history and culture.

November 30, 2005