On Loan from the Louvre

On Loan from the Louvre

Petit Palais - Avignon

Today, I’ll be at the Petit Palais in Avignon for On Loan from the Louvre.

There’s no escaping the Louvre. I had left Paris to spend two evenings at the Avignon Festival, and I decided to visit the Musée du Petit Palais again after twenty or thirty years. The Italian paintings of the Campana collection, bought by Napoleon III after the marquis’ bankruptcy in Rome and later scattered among French provincial museums, were gathered again at the Petit Palais in Avignon in the 1970s. While the city outside is swarming with people and it’s 102 degrees in the shade, I walk in perfect solitude through the cool of the museum rooms, followed by a young museum guard who eyes me suspiciously, probably taking me for a climate activist concealing some red or amber fluid in my pockets.  Most of the works are on loan from the Louvre, like this Cima da Conegliano Madonna and Child with Saint John the Baptist and Saint Francis, which catches my eye among so many powerful paintings because of Mary’s humanity and the loveliness of the flying angels with their little wings forming a collar beneath their chins. The 1970s museography, with its light, metallic style reminiscent of Carlo Scarpa, has aged better than certain heavy volumes of the Grand Louvre.