The most famous sight in Tours is probably the St-Gatin Cathedrale, which was begun in the early 13th century. The old city was also very lively and is worth a visit. Apparently it was close to being demolished in the 1960's before the mayor at the time totally revamped it. There is also the Church of St-Martin of which the only thing remaining is the Charlemagne Tower. St Martin was bishop of Tours in the 4th century and he must have been pretty popular with the people as there are now close to 400 churches named after him in France alone.
The St-Gatin Cathedrale in Tours
The old town area of Tours
The Hotel Gouin, which is now an archeaology museum with heaps of bronze-age and stone age and Roman artifacts.We also visited the Musee des Beaux-Arts, which was in what used to be the Archbishop's house. It had some nice gardens with a stuffed elephant 'Fritz' in a big stable. Some of the paintings in the gallery were a bit ugly, I don't know what it was with painters in the middle ages but they could not paint babies. It looked like they had never seen a baby in there life and just painted a really ugly, smaller person. Check out the really ugly Jesus in this painting, Mary looks alright so it's just babies the painter had troubles with.
Though in this painting both Mary and Jesus look pretty bad, so perhaps the painter just wasn't very talented
1 comment:
The renaissance painters used to explicitly paint the baby Jesus with the face of an adult. Something about symbolizing that this wasn't a normal baby: he was wise from his birth.
Of course, to us, he looks like some sort of demon-spawn, but they liked it.
See also the lack of perspective
Post a Comment