The Louvre

I give the French a hard time, I freely confess I do. It’s not the French people, who are unfailingly charming. (Also hot as a matchhead on one or two memorable evenings.) It’s the language…all those diacritical markings. A curmudgeon trying to push a circumflex through HTML is not a happy Curmudgeon.

As you may have surmised, the prompt is my reading of The Louvre by James Gardner. The author turns out to be an art scholar, which will figure later in this missive. But it begins where I absolutely did not expect it to, with our old friends the Plantagenets. I sort of remembered that the Louvre started out as a fortress, became a palace, then an art museum; and I’ve even looked at the foundations of the old fort on one or more visits. Turns out the fortress was built by King Philip II Augustus of France, the old boyfriend of Richard the Lionheart, by then King Richard I of England. And it was built because of him...and his mother.

The cause of Philip and Richard’s break-up was the Third Crusade. Something about Philip getting there first and trying to hog all the glory; plus some business about a few cities they’d promised to share but were now flying just the French colors. Philip bailed after Acre, thinking that fulfilled his crusader oath (and thereby obtained complete absolution for all of his worldly sins to date, presumably including those with Richard) while his now-ex fought on to Jaffa. Philip got captured and held for ransom for a few months on the way back, and as he sat and stewed it occurred to him that Richard and his mother, Eleanor of Aquitaine, held lands only 350 miles from Paris. Also that Eleanor, the same one who crossed the Pyrenees to steal a bride and Spanish alliance out from under him, was now ruling England and their French holdings in Richard’s absence. (Let that sink in: Richard had all sorts of male relatives, including a younger brother who would ultimately become king after him, but it never occurred to anyone that anybody other than Eleanor would rule as regent; it certainly never occurred to Eleanor.) So faced with an ex’s mother, who just happened to be his late father’s somewhat pushy former wife, Philip acted as any sane man would and built the first wall around Paris…only on what is now the Right Bank, the northwest, where the English were; and he built a fortress, the Louvre, just outside to defend it. As an art guy, Gardner is more general, saying the reinforcements were built to counter an English threat...but the full story is much more satisfying, don’t you think?

That was in 1190. Fast-forward 400 years or so to 1610, and ask yourself: what sort of man was Louis XIV’s father?

We all know Louis XIV, of course. Lots of wigs and silk and he danced ballet (danced it, didn’t watch it), but son of a bitch if he wasn’t straight. The same might not have been said of his Dear old Dad, Louis XIII. Our first sighting (at least in Gardner's telling) of the elder Louis has him riding down the Grande Galerie inside the Louvre. Two things made the event memorable: first, he was riding a camel. It was the first camel seen in France and it made an impression, not to mention set the stage for all four of Josephine Baker’s films a few hundred years later. And second, they had the space: the Grande Galerie is a third of a mile long (if it doesn’t seem that long today it’s because half of it is blocked off and the rest is littered with Old Masters) and thirteen yards wide. Why such a long hallway? To go to Grandma’s of course…when Grandma is Catherine d’Médicis and she lives in the Tuileries Palace. Recall that until Louis XIV France was a cultural backwater, and Italy was the big noise for artistic refinement. When Catherine arrived in France, the aristocracy considered her an ill-bred foreigner with too much money; Catherine had been raised in Médici splendor, thought the Louvre (by now a palace, since Charles X) was a dump with a lot of deferred maintenance, and figured “too much money” was the important part. As soon as her husband died, she built the Tuileries to her own specifications. Which included little touches like chambers for government and an opera house…it was quite the place. Her daughter-in-law, Anne of Austria, shared her opinion of the Louvre and ultimately moved over to Cardinal Richelieu’s palace, although she waited until the good Cardinal was dead to do it. There was just so much good real estate available in those days.

As to Louis XIII himself, he did not seem to miss his bride, Anne, that much. She had her own lovers and he preferred to spend his time making jam and styling his counselors’ hair. (I’m not making any of this up.) He also put a printing press on the top floor of the royal apartments in the Louvre and turned out some truly spectacular editions. After decades of marriage to Anne without issue, the country had given up hope on him producing an heir (are you surprised?) when something approaching a true miracle happened. Louis XIII was off hunting…was heading back to Paris to stay with a friend, but the weather turned bad. He stopped at the Louvre. All his furniture was gone, it having been sent ahead of the king to his planned destination. (That was a common practice in the day, the English did it too. And you can see a tail end of that practice even now: it is said that when the Queen flies commercial, they remove the fittings from the first class cabin and put in the Royal furniture.) So Louis XIII stopped at the Louvre to have dinner with his wife…they had a little wine and little talk about old times…there was only the one bed in the royal apartments…. And exactly nine months to the day, out popped little, sickly, Louis XIV, who would rule longer than any monarch in European history. Ballet shoes and all.

As an art historian, Gardner comes into his own with the seventeenth century and beyond, and tells most of the tale through the artists. Slightly tough going for those of us who never even took Art Appreciation, and unfortunately Gardner’s area of professional interest seems to lie with fat naked women with fat naked cherubs flying around them. But a few good rim shots are to be found. Marie Antoinette hung the Mona Lisa on her side of the bed, Dürer’s engraving of Erasmus on Louis XVI’s side. The Salon of 1667 was one of the earliest public art shows; when the organizers opened it, the Louvre was still a royal palace and they expected only a few artists and art historians to stop by. They were amazed when the general public came in large numbers…wonderment that was repeated a couple hundred years later when they heated the place and found themselves with the first Homeless Problem. The term “Salon” itself is a rip…a word taken from the room it was shown in, the Salon Carrée, which literally translated just means “big square room.” The French Revolution didn’t have as much impact on the city as we might have expected: the Salon of 1789 sold 18,200 catalogs, down from the 22,000 sold in the previous biennial but flat to the one preceding it; so cultural life continued. While David’s painting of Marat assasinated in his bath was not a part of the 1793 Salon, it was on display in the permanent gallery adjoining…since the event had happened less than a month before, it must have been a tad creepy to look at as you smelled the varnish drying.

There was much history after the Revolution, of course. The Tuileries Palace was burned by the Communards in 1871 for example, and then there was the Mitterrand reconstruction that I bumbled into in 1986. But we’ll leave it at the Revolution, because that point brings us full circle. The Revolutionaries destroyed a great deal of history and art as part of the Terror, but they stopped short at two works: Leonardo’s Mona Lisa, and a rock crystal goblet that had belonged to Eleanor of Aquitaine. Abbot Suger, the guy who came up with the Gothic cathedral and built the first one at Saint-Denis (thereafter the burial place of French monarchs), had given it to Eleanor’s first husband, Louis VII (“poor, pious Louis”). Lou was so taken with the whole Gothic thing that he built Notre-Dame de Paris in response, and Suger gave him the goblet as a Cathedral-warming present. Lou gave it to Eleanor, although Gardner doesn’t say when or how. Not that it matters…the key point is that even six centuries after her death the Revolutionaries knew History when they saw it, and they knew what Philip knew when he first built the place: the wife of two kings, and the mother of two more kings, you did not fuck with Eleanor of Aquitaine.