Angers and the Louvre

[Transcribed from paper diary]

9 July: Angers was incredible, although we would have enjoyed the exterior of the château and the city more if it hadn't been raining much of the day. But still, the city has lots of cute medieval streets, the château (dating mostly to the 13th c.) is most impressive, with its seventeen 40'-diameter round towers, thick wall, and huge, steep-walled moat, and the Apocalypse Tapestries are amazing. I took only a few photos of them, as we bought a guidebook that shows all the scenes in vivid color (shot from the back, which hasn't been exposed to light very often in 600 years so it hasn't faded as much). And the Cathedral is gorgeous too. I'd better return to that topic.

And the TGV was an interesting experience. When two of them pass, at (say) 180 km/hour each, or more, the relative speed is at least 100 m/sec, so the entire length of the other train passes one's window in a second.

Yesterday, 10 July, we returned to the Louvre to see some rooms that had been closed on our previous two visits: medieval French, Italian, & Spanish sculpture, medieval French, Dutch, German, & Flemish painting. On our tired way out, we re-visited some of the medieval "objets d'art".

10 July: lunch picnic (c. 5 € groceries), dinner 8.60 € at gyro place

The Cathedral at Angers has the same sorts of 12th-century sculpted figures at the portals as Chartres did, but one of the women has visible side-lacing -- as far as I knew, the side-lacing was only a hypothesis put forth to explain the horizontal wrinkling over the midriff in this garment. shalmestere and I spent a while last night puzzling over the various photos and postcards of these stretched portal figures. Today we plan to visit Senlis, whose Cathedral was built only a few years before Chartres (and in similar record time -- 40 years), so we hope to add more data to the pot. The Queen of Sheba figure in the "French medieval sculpture" section of the Louvre is in the same style, and I got some photos of it too.

Senlis today.

[Transcribed retroactively from paper diaries]

Senlis has gone from witnessing the coronation of Hugh Capet over 1100 years ago, through centuries of royal fame, through having its train station & some of its churches bombed in WWI, to being a quiet bedroom community, barely in commuting range of Paris... a quiet community with a 12th-century Cathedral (the inspiration for Chartres) and castle ruins built on 3rd-century Gallo-Roman fortifications. And much of the downtown area still looks medieval, with narrow, twisty cobblestoned streets meeting at random angles, lined with half-timbered and/or stone houses. I took a few dozen pictures, mostly on ASA 1600 (in the mistaken belief that most of the pictures would be of museum artifacts). The main portal of the Cathedral has figures sorta similar to those at Chartres, but they were all decapitated in the Revolution and restored rather oddly in 1835. And there seems to be only one woman on the entire portal: a Biblical seer named Deborah.

The stained glass has all been replaced in the last 200 years, and the surviving stone sculpture is much more deteriorated than at Chartres or Angers. Still, quite a pleasant day, between strolling the town streets, examining Gallo-Roman ruins & artifacts in the Musée d'Arts, and sitting in the idyllic garden surrounded by ruins of the 12th-c. royal castle.

lunch: 24.50€ (card)
transit: about 28€ (card)
dinner: c. 10.50€
museums: about 7€