Just a couple blocks off the river,
the Cluny Museum, filling a medieval mansion,
takes us back to Paris in the late Middle Ages.
In the 1400s, trade was beginning to boom
and the Renaissance was moving in like a warm front from Italy.
The Cluny Museum is an under-appreciated treasure.
Its rich collection of medieval art
offers a rare peek into that mysterious age.
The sumptuous ivory pieces...
Vibrant enamel work...
And gorgeous sculptures reflect a surprisingly refined,
and far from dark, society.
Its centerpiece is a 15th-century
series of tapestries called The Lady and the Unicorn.
In medieval lore, unicorns were solitary creatures
that could only be tamed by a virgin.
In secular society, they symbolized how a man
was drawn to his lady love.
In religion, the unicorn was a symbol of Christ.
These exquisite tapestries were inspired by
both secular and religious traditions.
They give us a peek at life, sensual life,
from a time when the people of Paris were
just stepping out of medieval darkness.
It's a celebration of all the senses.
Taste.
A woman takes candy from a servant's dish
to feed it to her parakeet
while a little dog licks his lovingly woven chops.
Hearing.
An elegant woman plays sweetly on an organ,
calming an audience of wild beasts.
In this fanciful world, humans and their fellow creatures
live in harmony in an enchanted garden.
Sight.
The unicorn cuddles up and looks at himself
in the lady's mirror, pleased with what he sees.
The lion turns away and snickers.
As the Renaissance dawns,
vanity is a less-than-deadly sin.
Touch.
That's the most basic and dangerous of the senses.
Here, the lady strokes the unicorn's horn...
And the lion looks out at us
to be sure we get the double entendre.
Medieval Europeans were celebrating
the wonders of love and the pleasures of sex.
The words on our lady's tent read,
"to my sole desire."
What is her only desire?
Is it jewelry?
Or is she putting away the necklace
and renouncing material things?
Is it God? Love?
The unicorn and lion open the tent.
Is she stepping out, or going in
to meet the object of her desire?
Human sensuality is awakening, a dark age is ending,
and the Renaissance is emerging.
The Louvre's huge collection
covers art history from ancient times
to about 1850.
It can be overwhelming.
A key to enjoying your visit --
don't even try to cover it all.
Enjoy an excuse to return.
Remember to look up for a sense of how,
long before it was a museum,
this was Europe's ultimate palace
and home of its mightiest kings.
In fact, the collection includes
royal French regalia, such as the crown of Louis XV
and the crown Napoleon wore on his coronation.
This museum is one of the world's oldest,
opened to the public during the French Revolution in 1793.
I guess it just makes sense.
You behead the king, inherit his palace
and a vast royal collection of art,
open the doors, and "voila" -- a people's museum.
The statue of Winged Victory seems to declare that
the Louvre's ancient collection is Europe's finest.
Two centuries before Christ,
this wind-whipped masterpiece of Hellenistic Greek art
stood on a bluff celebrating a great naval victory.
And just past her stands
an entourage of twisting and striding statues,
each modeling the ideal human form.
Venus de Milo has struck her pose
like a reigning beauty queen for 2,500 years now.
There must be more famous paintings here
than in any other museum.
The crowded grand gallery, while a quarter mile long,
displays only a small part of the Louvre's collection.
We'll feature a few paintings
representative of three styles --
Renaissance,
Neoclassical, and Romantic.
Francois I, who ruled through
the early 1500s, was France's Renaissance king.
His private paintings became
the core of the Louvre's collection.
It was trendy for kings to have
a Renaissance genius in their court.
One of Europe's greatest kings, Francois "Premier,"
got Europe's top genius, Leonardo da Vinci.
Leonardo's work epitomized the aesthetics
of the Renaissance, and the Louvre's collection
of his paintings demonstrates his lasting influence.
His "Virgin of the Rocks"
illustrates his trademark "sfumato" technique --
the subtle modeling of his faces,
and, in landscapes, how he shows distance
by making it hazier and hazier.
And this portrait, "Mona Lisa,"
believed to be of the wife of a Florentine merchant,
is Leonardo's crowd-pleasing masterpiece.
With her enigmatic smile,
she seems to enjoy all the attention.
Her body is solid and statue-like,
a perfectly balanced pyramid,
angled back so we can appreciate its mass.
Her arm, level with the frame,
adds stability and realism.
And again, Leonardo creates depth
in Mona's dreamy backyard.
For me, this painting sums up the Renaissance --
balance, confidence, and humanism,
the age when the common individual --
Mona Lisa -- becomes art-worthy.
Like the museum,
Napoleon was a product of the Revolution.
One of the Louvre's largest canvases shows
Europe's grandest coronation -- Napoleon's.
The pope traveled from Rome to Paris to crown Napoleon,
but Europe's most famous megalomaniac,
crown confidently in hand,
pretty much ran the coronation show himself.
The pope looks a little neglected.
The French Revolution was all about ending kings,
so Napoleon crowned himself emperor.
The politically correct art style of the time
was Neoclassical.
Napoleon would approve of everything in this room.
Greek, Roman, heroic,
or patriotic themes, clean, simple, and logical --
it's pure Neoclassical.
This Parisian woman, wearing ancient garb
and a Pompeii hairdo, reclines on a Roman-style couch,
perfectly in vogue.
Neoclassicism was an intellectual movement.
After all, during the Revolution,
everything was subjected to the "test of reason."
Nothing was sacred.
If it wasn't logical, it was rejected.
The reaction to Neoclassicism was a romantic movement --
"Romanticism."
Romanticism meant putting feeling over intellect,
passion over restrained judgment.
Logic and reason were replaced by a spirit
that encouraged artists
to be emotional and create not merely
what the eyes saw but also what the heart felt.
What better setting for an emotional work than the story
of an actual shipwreck?
In Gericault's "Raft of the Medusa,"
we see a human pyramid ranging from death and despair
at its base to a pinnacle of hope
as one of the survivors spots a ship,
which ultimately comes to their rescue.
If art controls your heartbeat,
this is a masterpiece.
The Romantic Movement championed nationalistic causes
of the 19th century.
Delacroix's "Liberty Leading the People"
shows the citizens in 1830, once again asserting their power
and raising the French flag at a barricade
in those troublesome back streets of Paris.
This painting and that struggle reverberate
with the French people to this day.
The Orsay Gallery, famous for its much-loved collection
of Impressionist masterpieces, fills an old train station.
The building itself is magnificent.
Train tracks used to go right down the middle.
The art of the Orsay takes you from 1848 to 1914.
This is the time when the old world meets the modern world.
It's conservative and revolutionary, side by side.
Before the Impressionists,
19th-century artists painted idealized beauty.
This was conservative art,
popular throughout the 1800s because it was...
Simply beautiful.
Cabanel's Birth of Venus is the quintessence of beauty.
The love queen reclines seductively,
just born from the foam of a wave.
At the time, sex was considered dirty
and could be exalted only in a more pure and divine form.
But whIle mainstream artists cranked out
these ideal beauties, a revolutionary new breed
of artist was painting a harsher reality.
Cross the tracks and you find the Realists.
In The Painter's Studio, Gustave Courbet takes us
behind the scene at the painting of a goddess.
The model, not a goddess but a real woman,
takes a break from posing to watch Courbet at work.
Ordinary people mill about.
The little boy seems to admire the artist,
already notorious for his nonconformity.
No one would show Courbet's work,
so he put on his own art show.
He built a little shack in the center of town
and hung his paintings, basically thumbing his nose
at the shocked public and his conservative critics.
Edouard Manet rubbed realism in the public's face,
and they hated it.
Manet's nude doesn't gloss over anything.
The pose is classic, but the sharp outlines and harsh colors
are new and shocking.
Her hand is a clamp;
her stare, defiant.
Ignoring the flowers her servant brings
from her last customer,
this prostitute looks out as if to say,
"next."
It's around 1880, and Manet and his rat pack
of conservatively dressed radicals gathered in Paris,
pushing the creative envelope.
It's time for the revolution of Impressionism to begin.
Impressionism initiated the greatest change in art
since the Renaissance.
Now, artists were free to delve into the world
of colors, light and fleeting impressions.
They featured easygoing, open-air scenes,
candid spontaneity and, always, the play of light.
Impressionists made their canvases shimmer
by an innovative technique.
Rather than mixing colors together on a palate,
they applied the colors in dabs side by side on the canvas
and let these mix as they traveled to your eye.
Up close, it doesn't work;
but move back, and voilà!
Claude Monet is called the "father of Impressionism."
For him, the physical subject was now only the rack
upon which to hang the light, shadows and colors.
August Renoir caught Parisians living and loving
in the afternoon sun.
Dappled light was his specialty.
In this painting, you can almost feel the sun's warmth
and smell the powder on the women's faces.
Even the shadows are caught up in the mood.
Everything's dancing.
Renoir paints a waltzing blur to capture,
not the physical details, but the intangible charm
of a restaurant on Paris's Montmartre.
A short walk takes us to the palatial mansion,
studio, and garden of
another great Impressionist -- Auguste Rodin.
Rodin was a modern Michelangelo,
sculpting human figures with powerful insight,
revealing through the body their deepest emotions.
Now a museum, this historic mansion
presents the full range of Rodin's work.
His early works match the Belle Epoque style
of the late 19th century --
noble busts of bourgeois citizens
and pretty portraits of their daughters.
But Rodin had working-class roots,
and because of his populist sentiments,
the art establishment snubbed him.
That's no wonder.
Look at the intensity of this symbol of France
as she screams, "libertie, egalitie, fraternitie!"
With his ground-breaking bronze man,
Rodin came into his own
and was recognized as an artistic force.
From this point on, he left convention behind
and blazed his own artistic trail.
Here, his "Hand of God" shapes Adam and Eve
from the mud of the Earth to which they will return.
Unlike Michelangelo, who selected a piece of marble
and then carved a single work of art,
Rodin created models which could then be reproduced
and sold as authorized versions.
In "The Kiss," a passionate woman twines around
a solid man for their first, spontaneous kiss.
We can almost read the emotions
that led up to this meeting of lips.
"The Kiss" was the first Rodin work the public loved.
Rodin enjoyed his garden, as do visitors today,
who find it a place for peaceful meditation
a century after the artist last planted a statue here.
He sculpted the famous "Thinker" in 1906.
Leaning slightly forward,
tense and compact, every muscle working toward
producing that one great thought,
man contemplates his fate.
Said Rodin, "It is a statue of myself."
While the Orangerie no longer contains plants,
today it's filled with a garden of Impressionist
and early-20th-century paintings --
select works by Renoir...
Cezanne...
Gaugin...
And others.
And its main attraction is Monet's "Water Lilies,"
floating dreamily in the oval rooms
the artist himself designed
to showcase his masterpiece.
This series of expansive, curved panels
is the epitome of Impressionism.
It immerses you in Monet's garden at Giverny,
his home and studio outside of Paris.
Like an aging Beethoven, who composed
his most dramatic works while losing his hearing,
the nearly blind Claude Monet spent his final years
painting these symphonies of color
on a similarly monumental scale.
We're looking into his pond, dotted with water lilies
and dappled by the reflections of the sky,
clouds, and trees on the surface.
Monet mingles the pond's many elements
and then lets us sort it out.
The true subject of these works is not the pond itself.
It's the play of the light reflecting off the water.
Monet would work on several canvases at the same time,
each one catching the light of a particular time of day.
Get close and see how Monet worked.
Starting from a blank canvas,
he'd lay down thick, big brushstrokes
of a single color, horizontal and vertical,
to create a dense mesh of foliage.
Over this, he'd add more color
for the dramatic highlights
until he got a dense paste of piled-up paint.
Up close, it's messy, but back up,
and the colors resolve into a luminous scene --
just pure reflected color.
Working, he'd move with the sun from one canvas to the next.
Panning slowly around this hall, you see the pond
turn from pre-dawn darkness to clear morning light
to lavender late afternoon to glorious sunset.
Sublime and tranquil,
Monet intended this to be a place of reflection.