Two museums in one day!

We broke our "Only one museum per day" rule yesterday, though we did keep the "No more than three hours per museum" one. But still, we were dragging at the end of the day. First up was the museum of French Architecture. (I can hear the yawns.) This is a beautiful and amazingly interesting place. It has two parts, one of which we didn‘t even know about when we visited this museum last year. In the early 1900's some bright person got the idea of making molds of all the interesting old churches and buildings throughout France. I guess these molds sat in storage for years, but finally funding was available to make and display casts from them; this museum displays a small portion of those casts. But what a display! Here's the cast of a Romanesque church:

This place is full of such façades, as well as architectural details of many chateaux and mansions in France. Walking through it is like taking a tour of 1200 years of French architecture, all in one building, all beautifully displayed.

The second part of this museum was every bit as interesting. Again, in the early 1900s, it was decided to make reproductions of the wall murals in the earliest churches in France. Until 1300 or so, church decoration was limited to paintings that covered the entire interior of the small Romanesque churches. Architects and artists went to these churches and made perfect reproductions. In this museum, the church's interior structures were reproduced and then the reproductions of the wall murals added. The result is that when you stand in these rooms, it's exactly as if you are standing in the actual churches, surrounded by these beautiful wall murals. There were probably thirty of these small rooms.

Next trip, that's where we go first; by the time we got to these, we were encountering museum fatigue. I don't have pictures of these rooms because they are pretty dark (the churches themselves were pretty dark) and flash photography not permitted. I know architecture is not high on most tourists' list of things to see; this whole museum was practically deserted. But Laurie and I have come to love looking at buildings and knowing something about architecture and archtectural history. We aren't, and never will be, close to experts, but we know enough to appreciate the beauty of buildings and what they meant to the people who used them. This museum is well worth a visit if you share that interest with us.

Next post: the second museum of the day was the Louvre. Exciting pictures of people taking cellphone photos of the Mona Lisa! Can't wait, can you?