Funny story: this morning, I somehow wound up on the subject of Grandpa's pigeon-caring. As I struggled to find words, the girl next to me looked horrified. "Pour manger?" she asked. Ah! Nope. We do not eat the pigeons. No no no. It was kind of funny though.
Anyway, I visited the Rodin Museum. Well, not really. The museum is undergoing renovations at the current moment. (How come this information always eludes me even when I do research prior to going?) Anyway, I did get to wander through the gardens for gratuit, so that was spectacular. It would have been nice to see flowers blooming, but if I waited until then, I wouldn't have time to see anything!
Homework is beckoning, so this will be a short one. It's quite a shame, as I took pictures of all the plaques so I could actually identify them later, but oh well. Maybe another time.
Called Monument to the Burghers of Calais, the plaque told me that it was made to commemorate six men who sacrificed themselves during an episode of the Hundred Years' War. Now, I know nothing about this war because America was not involved (because it wasn't around), and we're very provincial in our teachings. :/
Off to the side, there was a glass enclosure containing unfinished (or they looked unfinished to me) sculptures.
This is a monument to Victor Hugo. Now, this I like. It's relevant. It's got a fancy name (The Palais Royal Monument). The figures around him are apparently a sculpture of their own: The Tragic Muse. They made a mash-up in 1922-23. Anyway, Victor Hugo's got his arm out, and he's like, "I'm going to calm these waves, man." Exactly like that...
A lot of the sculptures I'm featuring are kind of awful in nature because they depict scenes from Dante's Inferno, which I read over a year ago. But it's pretty hard to forget this Canto: it's Ugolino and His Children. It looks like he's doing a terrible thing, but it turns out he's doing something even worse: he's eating them. Bleecccccchhhhh. I don't think I had dinner that night. There are soooo many Inferno sculptures. Maybe that's what I'll do my report on, since I find them morbidly fascinating...
This led to quite a lot of confusion on my part. There were two plaques, and they both described twisted figures. I had no idea which one referred to the sculpture on the left. Then, I saw the empty pedestal, and I realized that the other one is gone.
Now here's The Spirit of Eternal Repose. Repose? That looks like a mighty uncomfortable position. I feel bad for the human model.
Sorry for all the Orpheus, but this is probably my favorite sculpture.
1.) The myth of Orpheus and Eurydice is a great if not depressing tale.
2.) I stumbled upon this sculpture by taking a turn into the greenery on the right of the giant lawn. No one else was nearby, whereas all the sculptures had at least one person hovering nearby. It was very peaceful, like how this garden should be.
3.) The placement of this statue is also very different than the others (with maybe the exception of The Thinker), and I found it very compelling.
Beautiful, right?
The Caryatid with Stone and The Caryatid with Urn were both fascinating, structure-wise. It's one of the rare sculptures that you can circle and photograph from all angles without seeming like a pornographer to onlooking tourists with selfie sticks.
I had to zoom in on these two because they were up by the house in the Forbidden Zone. So I don't know anything about them, but as always, the missing arms and missing head make them look much cooler than if they were whole.
Here we have the sculpture Eve. She's nowhere near Adam, strangely. (I just thought that'd be a natural configuration.) And the sign talks all about how she's bowing her head in shame. Oh, sigh. One particular passage in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man has a priest describing the Serpent Scene to the boys. He was like, "The devil as a serpent approached the woman, as she was the weaker vessel." And I was like, Whoa whoa whoa, what are you saying, Joyce? Then it went on to say, "And when Eve tempted Adam with the fruit, he was unable to resist her." Well, that's his own damn fault! As a contemporary feminist, I found the sentence a little too much like "I had to fire her because she was too pretty and it was so distracting." Ugh.
And here's a sculpture of Balzac. Now, I know he's a great writer and everything, but all I honestly know about him is that line from "Pick-a-Little, Talk-a-Little" in The Music Man.
Unknown Woman (sorry, I'm terrible with names): She advocates dirty books!
Harold Hill: Dirty books?
Woman 1: Chaucer.
Woman 2: Rabelais.
Woman 3: Balzaaaaac.
Sorry, Balzac, but that's your legacy with musical theater geeks.
Here we have another scene from Inferno: these are The Three Shades who stand at the entrance of Hell. You know:
Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.
Which, to add my snark, is how I pretty much felt whenever I entered my Intro to Mathematical Reading class. :|
Now here's what you've been waiting for! Le penseur, or The Thinker. It's rather intimidating. A lot of these statues look down on you. They're judging! They're thinking, If another group of giggling girls pulls out a selfie stick, I'm going to come alive and scare them. You've been warned...
Then it was my turn to do a "look at me! look at me!" pose.
And, of course, like how you can't go to the Mona Lisa and not attempt an enigmatic smile or you can't take of picture in front of the Statue of Liberty without crossing one arm and waving the other in the air, I posed pensively. I think it's quite a likeness.
And I'll leave you with an image untainted with my snark. :)
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