Franco Fridays: The Louvre, a few paintings

How do you share pictures from The Louvre without boring your blog readers?  Maybe by serving it up in bite-size posts, perhaps.

I think I shared in my original post from France that I enjoyed it more than I expected.  It was amazing!  Brilliant!

 L'Enfant Jesus

I thought this statue of Hercules defeating Hydra was beautiful.  The detail in his hair and beard!  When I look at things like that I just think, who decides to try to do that??  Carve a face from stone?  It's impressive.

How many people from our group can you spot?  At first I only saw KJ, but then I started spotting other people, too.

There were amazing ceilings.

There were these beautiful jewels.

KJ and I kind of wondered around with no real sense of which exhibits we were heading toward.  The Louvre is so vast, and we weren't really sure what we would want to see.  We stumbled upon some beautiful paintings of biblical scenes we were familiar with, which was helpful since we couldn't read the French signs.  I scanned the labels for familiar-looking words and later found out that, OF COURSE, there were cards in each room with the signs translated to English.  That would have been helpful.

The Woman Caught in Adultery and brought to Jesus

We stumbled upon this view from an upstairs window.  I love how you can see all three arcs lined up in it.  Look closely.

KJ really liked this painting of the people of Ephesus burning all of their items used for witchcraft after hearing Paul's preaching.

 

We found that knowing the story behind a painting significantly increased our enjoyment of it.  Like this picture of Joseph and a young Jesus.  It's beautiful.  The use of light and shadow is so lovely.

 The Sabine Women

Seven Brides for Seven Brothers makes it funnier.  This looks pretty sad. 

I read a lot of The Three Musketeers before our trip, so I was excited to find a painting of the villainous Cardinal Richelieu.

And this next painting...KJ lost it over this guy's face.  This is Henry IV posing as Hercules defeating Hydra.  If you ever want to make KJ happy, find him a print of this.  I think it's something about his casualness, as if this is no big deal for a guy like him.

And because there's only so much artwork you can fit into one blog post, we'll leave the rest of our favorites for next Friday.