Kongo is on the road again. He and his lovely simian bride are in Paris prior to boarding a seven-day river cruise to Normandy, and then traveling on to London for some theater and culture. Today they visited the Louvre.
The monkeys opted to go for a guided tour of the famous museum. This one was found by Mrs. Kongo through Viator and was billed as a “Skip-the-Line, Masterpiece Fully Guided Tour.” Now skipping the line is important for a Louvre tour. Essential. The museum sees somewhere between 30,000 to 70,000 visitors a day. Yes each and every day. The lines to gain entry to the museum and pass through security can be enormous. Kongo doesn’t do lines well, particularly those that can be hours long. Even with back-door short cuts and head-of-the-line privileges, it still took more than half an hour to get inside. Mrs. Kongo thought the tour would be limited to 10 culture minded monkeys. So, of course, 29 of our new found friends followed our cheerful guide Omar (from Morocco) in to see the sights. All good.
Kongo has visited the Louvre before. Not much seemed to have changed from 10 years ago when the monkey was here last except that there seemed to be a lot more people than he remembered. Like lots and lots more people. Check out the photo at the start of this blog post. That’s the Mona Lisa way, way in the distance behind about 200 people Of course, it is spring break in the United States and there were plenty of high school tour groups of 100 or more moving like obstructed bowel movements through the museum, preceded by shouts of “Hey guys! This way, pay attention! That means you, Jaden.” God bless the chaperones.
Now here’s a bit of Louvre trivia the monkey picked up on. High profile celebrities can skip all the lines and all the people by arranging a private museum viewing. That’s right, given Kongo’s status as an influencer monkey he should have checked that out. Evidently, Tuesdays are reserved for these elite groups. As you might imagine, this doesn’t come free. Our tour guide, Omar from Morocco, told us that it was in the range of $500,000 for one of these special tours, but given Omar’s penchant for embellishing this might not be the exact truth. The monkey suspects the price might be negotiable. Maybe next time.
Mostly this tour hit the highlights. The high, high highlights. In Kongo’s opinion (not shared by Mrs. Kongo), Omar spent too much time talking about French paintings (and the crowning of Napoleon as emperor in particular) for his taste. Now that doesn’t mean French paintings are awful. They’re great. It’s just that the monkey wanted to spend more time on Ancient Greek, Roman, and Egyptian works. Now full disclosure, Kongo is a docent at the Getty Villa Museum in Malibu which specializes in Greek and Roman artifacts, so his tastes are a bit tilted. The short time spent walking through the ancient galleries was wonderful and the monkey did go back after the tour for a few more hours of time with the ancients. The sheer number of Greek vases at the Louvre was staggering. Gallery after gallery of black-figure, red=figure, and bilingual vases piled on top of each other. Some were out where visitors could actually touch them which frankly shocked the monkey to his core. The same with the statuary galleries.
One of Kongo’s favorite tour stops when he leads tours at the Getty Villa is the Mazarin Venus, a Roman copy of the legendary Aphrodite of Knidos by the great Greek sculptor Praxitiles about 350 BC. There were plenty of Praxitiles inspired Aphrodite/Venus works at the Louvre and he plans to use the images below as teaching examples on his next tour at the Getty Villa.
Now, when the Venus de Milo was found on the Greek island of Melos in 1820, the French tried to carry it off to the Louvre. Outraged Greek islanders tried to intervene and more than 200 were killed by the crew from the French ship. The islanders followed the French to the port of Piraeus where another clash occurred between the Ottoman Turk soldiers protecting the crew, and the aggrieved Greeks leading to the killing of another 200. So in the world of stolen artifacts, and this is a hot topic in our modern times, this beautiful statue sparked a small war over its heist by the French 200 years ago. The Goddess of Love would have been horrified. I guess the Louvre should feel lucky that recently (January 28, 2024) healthy food advocates only threw soup on the Mona Lisa and didn’t resort to gunfire.
The Egyptian Sphinx, actually the Great Sphinx of Tanis, guards the entrance to the Egyptian galleries. Our tour guide, Omar from Morocco, told us that the nose was shot off by Napoleon as a joke. Actually, there is no evidence of any connection between this sphinx and the short emperor. As I mentioned earlier, Omar tended to exaggerate. Maybe he was building on the folklore that Napoleon’s troops shot the nose of the Great Sphinx at Giza with canon fire (Omar talked about that too) but that isn’t true either. The big sphinx next to the pyramids lost its nose long before the arrival of Napoleon.
The two hour tour was actually pretty good, even with Omar’s flights of fantasy. Kongo knows how difficult it is to lead a group of almost thirty people through a museum and keep their attention. Omar was funny and friendly and (mostly) knowledgeable. Kongo’s beef is that the stories behind the artifacts are fascinating enough without making up something that didn’t happen. It’s as easy to tell the truth as it is to not…and “I don’t know” is a good answer. A tour guide should never lie to those trusting him for culture.
Now Mrs. Kongo kept telling the monkey to take a breath and that nobody knew the difference anyway. (Well, Kongo knew the difference …) and it was a fun tour. There you go. (You should have been there when Omar tried, unsuccessfully, to explain why the penis size on the statues was smaller than ‘normal’)
The mummy portraits were off display. That really bummed the monkey out. He just finished teaching a course at California Lutheran University that included mummy portraits and he really, really wanted to see the Louvre’s collection. Maybe next time.
We dodged a rain shower on the hike back to the hotel, took a nice nap, and had a dinner of French onion soup and a martini which Kongo found delicious and Mrs. Kongo thought was only okay. There you go. Of course, Kongo’s banana split (what else?) was weird because they were out of bananas and whipped cream! (No charge)
Travel safe. Have fun.
