Managing Expectations: The Museum Edition

When I visited the Prado in Madrid, I had a plan. I went twice in order to scout the area and devise the best plan of attack. With the Louvre, I had no such opportunity. We just attacked it. Well, that’s not really true. Nicole and I decided before we arrived that it would be folly to try to hit each floor. So instead we picked one. Actually we picked two floors, but soon realized we only could do one. And we didn’t even do the entire floor.


First things first, the Louvre doesn’t just house beautiful works and paintings, it is beautiful. It’s a former palace and so it’s full of stunning ceiling paintings and wood work.

Inside the Louvre

Secondly, you ask most people and they’ll say the most famous works in the Louvre are the Mona Lisa and the Venus de Milo. Of course, because they are so famous, they’re also the most disappointing. If anyone reading this is excited to go to the Louvre to see these two works, starting ramping down your expectations now. I know I did. The Mona Lisa is especially lack lustre. It’s very small for one thing. And there is so much security around it that it takes the fun out of it.

Da Vinci's Mona Lisa and her security.
There are also guards on each side of her

The Venus

There is the cool factor: I’m standing in front of a really famous painting. Then there's the Venus which is slightly more interesting because it’s a statue and quite stunning. But there are more interesting things in the Louvre. There’s a section dedicated to the apartments of Napoleon III, which Nicole accurately summed up by saying, “Easy on the velvet.” There’s an area dedicated to Crown Jewels, and there are other, lesser known but much more interesting works of Da Vinci. So if you go, don't just see the famous stuff, take in the whole floor.

Napoleon's Apartments

Very famous painting of the French Revolution

Da Vinci's Madonna on the Rocks

A surprisingly nice museum is the Museé D’Orsay which exhibits mostly impressionist art from the 1860s to 1914ish. If at the Prado I was reasonably sure that I preferred impressionism, this is where I became sure of it. D’Orsay is full of Monet and Manet, Degas and Picasso, water lilies and dancers, really pretty paintings with vivid colours and scenery. If you like pretty things, you won't be disappointed here. I'd love to show you pictures from it, but my camera wasn't working that day.