Paris - Visiting The Louvre Part I

The first full day in the center of Paris was spent mostly walking through The Louvre museum.  You could spend years walking through that place and not really see everything in there.  It truly is an amazing collection of artifacts, paintings and sculptures.

I forgot to take a picture of the famous glass pyramid when walking in, but was able to get a shot as we left.  See all those people... when we first got to the museum at 10am, there was only about 20 people in line/milling about.  As the day wore on, the lines got longer and longer to get in.


One of the first areas we went to after entering was the Roman sculptures.  There were absolutely fabulous.  To think that people made these detailed sculptures without the tools that we have today.  All the sculptures in the pictures below that are in the "atrium" were actually all outdoors at one point in time.  They've now been enclosed in this glass atrium to ensure they don't degrade any more from the elements.





After getting past the main courtyard, we found a ton more sculptures.  The detail on this cape as absolutely stunning!




I don't recall what this next one was from, but the intricacy of it was unbelievable!  The whole thing stood probably about 8 feet tall, but the small details inside were easily less than a 1/4".


Here's a close-up:




There was also this beautiful archway with very detailed carving in it.


After going through most of the sculptures (which I took photos of about 1%), we made a brief tour through Napoleon's quarters.  We weren't really that interested in it, but we were trying to find out way through the buildings to the next area we wanted to see.  I didn't take a lot of photos of Napoleon's quarters (living spaces), but the few that I did take were pretty breath-taking.


The ornate details in the ceilings, walls, and the chandelier were incredible.  In one room they had it setup for a dining room that could probably seat 50 people.  The wood table was absolutely stunning!


The gold details on the doors and walls was very impressive.  One could probably say that they should peel off that gold and help fund the economy, but it would be heart-breaking to ruin these treasures that have been around for so many centuries.


The next post that I do will show the paintings that we saw in the next areas of the museum.  I didn't want to make the posts too long with the pictures, so I'm trying to break it up a bit and put it into manageable sizes.

Enjoy!

Happy Crafting!
~Sarah at upstateNYCreations