There are 3 galleries there, the Richelieu, the Sully and the Denon. Since I'm going to be here for a year I've decided to take my time. From my last visit I remember being a bit overwhelmed by the Louvre, as I think are a lot of visitors. So this weekend I planned to go see one of the galleries, and in the end I think I chose the biggest gallery, the Richelieu, so I only ended up seeing 3 of the 4 floors. In this gallery were all the objets d'art as the French call them, basically anything that is art but isn't a painting. The Mesopotamian stuff was awesome, definitely my pick out of this gallery and the other good stuff was the Middle Ages art. The Middle Ages stuff was all pretty mundane objects, like plates, rings, teapots and a few swords but it was like people had just discovered that even mundane stuff can be made to look ornamental and they just went crazy with it!
My advice for anyone one visiting Paris and just wanting to visit the Louvre without spending 3 whole days there is to grab a map from the information booth. The map marks all the famous/big name pieces in the different galleries. I would go see them and try really hard not to get side-tracked. Pretty much every period is represented so you see a bit of everything and if you like one particular area you just spend a bit longer there. Now I'm going to bore you with a whole stack of photos of my favourite stuff.
The obligatory shot of the front of the Louvre
Really short monks carrying a knight
This was the cool middle ages art. The first is what looks like a tea urn, there was one lion that had 2 spouts! The second is a plate from the middle ages, it doesn't look all that practical, I reckon that lizard would get pretty annoying pretty quickly.
The first photo here is a really tall man who was in the gothic section, maybe people were abnormally proportioned back then?
The other photo is from the Mesopotamia section, there were some awesome statues there, stuff right out of Indiana Jones
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