Gallery of pictures taken in the Louvre in the Department of Prints and Drawings:

In January 2024, I went back to the Department of Prints and Drawings in the Louvre to access some paintings and drawings which are not shown in the Museum. I followed the same procedure to have the authorization to look at, consult and take pictures of the specific artworks kept at the Louvre.
I wanted to see a painting, which was acquired by the Louvre a few years before the pandemic. The painting had this particularity, both sides were painted. They both represented scenes from  Iliad Book 21. One side represents the anger of Achilles, who is killing Trojans, and the other side also represents a very angry Achilles, who in a rage is fighting the river-god Scamander and the river Simoïs. It shows episodes of Achilles killing Trojans and fighting the river Scamander. The painter used pen and brown ink, brown wash. watercolor and gouache on bistre paper. It was signed and dated in front but erased. The drawing, anonymous, is partially doubled on the back, which makes it difficult to decipher.

Here is the translation by the Kosmos Iliad Study group of the moment when Achilles tries to hold on a tree to  avoid being drowned by the river.

…Achilles leapt into the middle of the river, springing from an overhanging bank, but he (the river) hastened seething with a swell, and in a rage he rose all its water and pushed along the numerous corpses, who were on it in heaps, whom Achilles had killed, these he threw out bellowing like a bull on the dry land, but he saved the living in the beautiful streams, hiding them in the great deep eddying streams.
But around Achilles a terrible wave foaming up stood up, and the water falling pressed forward the shield, he could not with his feet stand firmly, but he seized with his hand an elm, big and well-grown, but it, tumbling from the root, tore away the entire overhanging bank, and blocked the lovely stream with its crowded branches, it dammed up the river itself crushing down entirely within the river itself.

Iliad 21. 233-245

Some pictures show the painting in full on the stand provided at the Louvre in the beautiful room of consultation. Other pictures show a close-up of some parts of the paintings.

I also asked to consult other paintings. Among them, the following ones are in this gallery:

Odysseus and Nestor visiting Achilles in his tent, by Cades Giuseppe

Priam pouring a libation to Zeus by Joseph Marie Vien.

Herakles fighting against the centaur Nassos by Passerotti Bartolomeo.

Homer and the enigma of the fishermen by Passerotti Bartolomeo.

That painting evokes the story told in the Vitae of Homer. Homer was told by the Delphic oracle that he was to die in Ios, the city of his mother, but to be careful when answering a riddle asked by children who had been fishing. Homer is not able to answer, then he dies.

CITATION:   Compton, Todd M. 2006. Victim of the Muses: Poet as Scapegoat, Warrior and Hero in Greco-Roman and Indo-European Myth and History. Hellenic Studies Series 11. Washington, DC: Center for Hellenic Studies. http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:hul.ebook:CHS_Compton.Victim_of_the_Muses.2006.

While in the Louvre, I also asked to see some oil paintings, esquisses, used by the artist Maurice Denis, to make very large paintings/canvases. I was told that these paintings had been sent back to the Orsay Museum. I was given permission to go and consult them there. There is no special room to consult paintings in Orsay. The person in charge shows them right in the huge place where all the treasures are stored. It was an amazing experience. It happens that they were in the process of sending Denis’s paintings to another Museum in France and I was lucky that they still had two of the series, the first and the last.  The large paintings are in the Hermitage Museum.  

The story of Psyche and Eros belongs to Apelus’Metamorophoses. 

Here is a description of the two paintings:
Psyche is kidnaped by Eros
After her ordeals, Psyche is given ambrosia and immortality by Zeus, and celebrates her marriage to Eros.

The two last pictures show two paintings representing Helen on the walls of Troy. One, painted by Gustave Moreau, was from the Department of Prints and Drawings in the Louvre. The other, representing the same scene, painted by Paul Grandhomme, was taken at Orsay in the reserve collection. The pictures were not taken under a proper light, and you can view a better photograph on the Orsay Museum collection site.

In 2015, I was asked by Claudia Filos to prepare a gallery for Kosmos (Hour 25) Gods and Heroes at the Louvre.
The Gallery of Pictures taken in the Louvre in the Department of Prints and Drawings is my last gallery for Kosmos.

Note: Images have been selected from pictures that are freely available with open source or Creative Commons licenses or from photographs sent in by community members for the purpose. The images in this post are intended to suggest the subject, rather than illustrate exactly—as such, they may be from other periods, subjects, or cultures. Attributions are based where possible by those shown by galleries or museums, or on Wikimedia Commons or Flickr at the time of publication on this website.
Images retrieved 2024.

Hélène Emeriaud is a member of Kosmos Society.