Day 3...

today we went to one of the most famous museums in the world... the Louvre. full of paintings, sculptures, furniture, and people; the Louvre is the home to many famous works, such as the Monna Leisa, the statue Venus De Milo (otherwise known as Aphrodite), and The Scream. it is also home to a collection of Jacques-Louis David paintings. David is author of several political paintings, such as the Oath of the Horatii, which depicts three brothers vowing to defeat their enemies or die, while their mothers, wives and daughters looked on in horror. David is also author of the rape of the Sabine women, which show the Sabine women trying to keep their fathers and brothers from killing their husbands, and their husbands from killing their brothers and fathers. David is also a political painter and is known for his painting The wreck of the Medusa. the painting shows a raft full of starving people who are slowly dying off. in the very very far right corner, yup can see the small outline of a ship sailing away. the story behind the painting is this; the Medusa was sailing with a bunch of aristocrats on board. well, the ship sprang a leak and began sinking into the ocean. the aristocrats decided that they needed to lighten the weight of the ship. since they believed that they were so important, they decided that they would stay on the ship. so, they made several of the crewmen get into a raft that they towed behind the ship. after a while, the aristocrats saw that the ship was still sinking, and they decided that it was the raft that was weighing them down. so the aristocrats on the ship cut the rope tying the raft to them, and they left the seamen on the raft drifting in the middle of the ocean to starve. the painting is painted to look like you are on the raft with the dying men...and David did this to prove a point. the whole purpose of The wreck of the Medusa was to warn the people that the aristocrats were going to cut off the people and leave them adrift in the ocean that is life.

also, i thought about how life must have been back then, and i wondered about the specific things that happened in the lives of the painters that provoked such beautiful, passionate, and insightful paintings. we as a younger generation may not understand why they were created, but i fully believe that if even one painting had been lost (as I'm sure many were) then we would have l0st a piece of the culture that creates and shapes us every day.