Mona Lisa Overdrive

Yesterday, after the first conference I'm here for ended, we went to the Louvre. It's open late on Wednesday, so we were able to get a few hours in. They say you can spend a whole month there, but since I'm generally interested in more modern works (a preference Christina shares to some extent), I think we had enough time.

We started out with some Egyptian antiquities...



Then we made the obligatory pilgrimage to the Mona Lisa...



There she is!



One of their Vermeers was in Frankfurt, but they still had "The Astronomer" around.




We amused ourselves by making up fake captions to some of the pictures. My caption for this Reubens was, "Can I get a little help here?"



My favorite painting may have been Hieronymus Bosch's The Ship of Fools. And not just because I like saying "Hieronymus Bosch." It's a fairly cutting satire of religion...see the nun in the center playing the lute and attempting to take a bite out of some sort of food. (Sorry that the image isn't clearer, but it's hard to take pictures without a flash.)



Despite the best efforts of the museum staff to fail to give us directions, we made our last stop at the Venus de Milo. Perhaps because of the lack of crowds, perhaps because of the size of the piece, perhaps because of the setting, she was more impressive to me than the Mona Lisa.