Adam Morgenstern is Professor Moriarty (napoleonic_star) wrote in musingslogs, @ 2010-12-04 20:06:00 |
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Entry tags: | moriarty |
Who: Adam (anyone whose character has a reason to be in Paris is welcome to join)
What: Assessing art
Where: The Louvre
When: Sunday, mid-morning
Warnings: None
Having flown in on Saturday and spent most of the day doing nothing, Adam left his hotel on Sunday with a purpose. He walked from the Ritz to the Rue de Rivoli, crossing into the Jardin des Tuileries. It was a cool day, the leaves gone from the trees, but the gardens were still lovely. There was something enchanting about the bare-limbed trees, something elegant and expressive. Perhaps that was why he loved winter landscapes. The trees looked like lithe dancers, their arms reaching for the sky. There was freedom in their nakedness, artful and uncontainable freedom.
Idling in the garden, it took him a full fifteen minutes to reach the Jardin du Carrousel. He made his way slowly through the crowd, another faceless, unimportant person in a sea of people. His anonymity made him smile when he passed by a police officer. The poor man didn’t stop him; why should he? The officer couldn’t know Adam’s intent. No one did. There was power in being unknown, in being a number with no identity.
He entered the museum by way of that ostentatious pyramid, the ugly thing glittering in even the muted sunlight. He paid for his ticket with cash, not seeing a reason to let anyone think he was at the museum, and made his way in. Though he had several specific goals in mind, he saw no reason not to amuse himself with the whole of the museum. He spent a few hours in the Egyptian exhibit before making his way to the section of the museum dedicated to Islamic art. He found the Greco-Roman exhibits painfully boring, but that wasn’t surprising; there was little fascinating about them. He wandered toward the Denon Wing in spite of himself, and once there, he found a bench in front of Liberty Leading the People and sat.
She was beautiful, Madame Liberty. Her strength and power was unquestionable, her dedication unwavering. Though dirty, she was pristine. Her nudity was not shameful, but empowering. Holding the flag above her head, she led her people, rallied them, demanded they follow her. She was enticing. Stiff from sitting so still for so long, he rose, passing The Raft of the Medusa and Une Odalisque without interest. They were lovely, well painted pieces, but he didn’t care for them. The former was a disgusting display of humanity at its best and worst, and the latter was somehow disturbing. He couldn’t deny the woman’s beauty in the second painting, but he did not care. She was unappealing.
The Oath of the Horatii arrested his attention when he came to it, and he stood before it, in the middle of its splendor. Jacques-Louis David was one of his favorite painters, but there was little chance he’d ever be able to display one of David’s pieces should he acquire one. Ah, well. He would sate his desire to own by looking. His fingers twitched at his side, flexing, desperate to take and hold and claim the beautiful painting as his own. A museum employee approached him tentatively some ten minutes into his perusal of the painting, and without invitation Adam struck up a conversation with the young man – an art history major. When he excused himself at the end of their conversation, Adam left the Denon Wing. He had no desire to gaze upon the lauded Mona Lisa again. In fact, he was little impressed with the piece on a whole, even though he knew he was one of the only people to feel that way. He didn’t care for the woman’s “mystery” or the way in which the painting had been rendered. Let other fools gaze on that. He had work to do.
His two goals hung in the Sully Wing on the second floor not too far from each other. The Bolt, by Fragonard, and Diana Leaving Her Bath, by Boucher. He wanted both in a strange way. It wasn’t the desperate clawing desire to own that he felt for The Oath of the Horatii, perhaps because he didn’t care much about these paintings. David had been one of his first loves. Fragonard and Boucher were merely pleasing painters who knew what they were doing with a brush and color. He would have preferred to come by The Swing and Mars and Venus, but those were in the Wallace Collection in London, and he rarely did business in London. So The Bolt and Diana it would be. A wry smile turned his lips upward as he gazed at Diana in her painting, thinking about how lovely she would look on his wall.
For the briefest of moments, he felt poorly for the people in charge of the Louvre’s security. In less than a day, they would likely be looking for new positions.