The Louvre

I had seen the Mona Lisa before, in 1968, when I was in the Army, stationed in Germany. I remember entering a dark gallery in the Louvre, and there she was. Tiny. Not much bigger than a book cover, I thought. I was very surprised. Humans never seem to afford icons the possibility of being small. She had a lot of wall space to herself, befitting her station. In the gallery, in the dark, sat maybe a dozen people with easels or sketchbooks, painting the Mona Lisa.

This time, 38 years later, I was surprised again. She has her own wall, free-standing and well-lighted in the middle of one of the galleries. It made her look larger. I was surprised by how large she appeared, compared to my 1968 memory. Something about history is connected to the present, to the moment that the history is viewed. That history becomes the history of the viewer, and I now possess two histories of the Mona Lisa. If that is true, then da Vinci could only have painted the Mona Lisa once. A painting done 20 years earlier, or later, would have belonged to a separate history. The light would have been different, and the position, and the subject, but most of all the artist.

So now the Mona Lisa had caught me in two snapshots, one from 1968, one from 2006. She was the same, but not to me. Thinking about that brought me very much into the present. Karen was on that same intellectual track, but I didn’t know it yet. We had sought out the Big Three – Mona Lisa, Winged Victory, Venus de Milo – thinking that’s why we were there, and after that we would settle into contemplation of the lesser works. The lesser works of the Louvre. What does a masterpiece have to do? One of them may have been the Apollo of the Belvedere.

We spent a couple of hours with the lesser works, including a break for espresso and pastry. As we arrived back at the subterranean entry lobby, it was dusk. To get to the escalator up to ground level, we first had to take an escalator down. “We have to go down so we can go up,” I said, and something about that entered Karen’s thinking. In our stay, we had several long conversations in our cozy flat, and in one of them, we decided that between us, Karen is the true problem-solver, and I am one who may say something that helps someone else solve a problem (“Hey, Einstein, why don’t you take the streetcar home today?”). Going down to go up was one of those somethings.

On the escalator to ground level, rising into the middle of the glass pyramid, Karen saw something that changed her. Originally, the Louvre was a palace. From the escalator, she saw not the Louvre, but the Palace, through the brightly lit pyramid windows. “Mesmerizing,” she said. She took photo upon photo. Eventually we stepped outside, and when we did, into the cold evening air, she said the world changed. She said she had thought she had always been drawn to the Louvre by the art. Now she knew it was not the art. It was the Louvre itself. The Louvre was the same, but not to Karen. She saw a Palace, and in that moment, she came into possession of a second history of the Louvre. But she had not been here before. What was the first history? It made for a long and fascinating conversation that night, back home in our flat.