Unlike most previous museum blogging, I’m not going to attempt all nine hours in a single hit. I have no coherent plan of how I’m going to organise the hundreds of photos of art works, but probably a bit at a time over the coming weeks. Firstly then, the Louvre itself. A very, very small amount of it. I could easily have spent a few hours just photographing the museum itself, ceilings, rooms, halls, voids and courtyards. The upper floors are sparse, stripped architecture, like parts of the Pergamon in Berlin—especially with the vast interior stair salle. It’s only on the first floor, really in the Sully wing with Napoleon III’s apartments that things go all stupendously Baroque and Neoclassical. (Which is why I have to come back to Paris: to finish seeing the Louvre, to visit Pompidou and to visit Versailles.) The architecture turns again in the Denon wing, and again in the stumps and remains of the mediæval fortress which I ran through just as everyone was getting kicked out, empty of people after the rush hour of the Italian collection.
