Art du jour (2)

Vierge en oraison

Virgin in prayer

Jean Bourdichon

Tours, 1480?

When I was studying in Tours for 2 months in 2010 I went to the Musée des Beaux Arts and bought a postcard of this painting. Instead of sending it out I kept it my room wherever I happened to be. 

In 2011 I was back home in Chicagoland doing an internship required for graduation. The Art Institute of Chicago was having an exhibition entitled "Kings, Queens, and Courtiers: Art in Early Renaissance France" which I went to on one the free visiting days they have with a friend. 

I turned a corner and voilà! saw this painting all the way from France. What a wonderful surprise it was! I think I took it as a sign of sorts, but as to what kind of sign, I have no idea exactly.

I'm all about Marian iconography. I'm sure that my name being what it is (Maria) has something to do with it. :) I like the crucial role art played in the Catholic Church for centuries and I like thinking about the personal choices artists had to make in creating an image of the Vierge.

Fleur d'oranger

Orange Blossom! Every now and then I'll get a flashback of sorts to my time in France. I'll see something or read something that I recognize as particularly French and realize even more just how many little cultural differences exist between the U.S. and France.

I was in a bookstore in Chicago recently when I stumbled upon a book of wedding fashions throughout the decades. While I was flipping through the pages, I found out that orange blossoms were a traditional staple of weddings especially during the Victorian era with brides wearing them as wreaths or making them a part of their bouquet. This was interesting to me because until I went to France this past year, I don't even think I had ever heard of orange blossoms being used in any context or mentioned in any way at all.

When I visited Provence I noticed a lot of perfumes, soaps, and shampoos (which are big selling items for tourists in region) are fleur d'oranger scented. Since I've never seen anything orange blossom scented in the United States, I made sure to buy fleur d'oranger scented soaps and perfumes knowing that it wouldn't be that easy to buy such things back home. I really love the fleur d'oranger scent and every time I smell it, I'm reminded of living in France.

Francophile 4 life

Now that I've left France I really need to try hard to keep up with my French language skills or at least with French news... The farthest I've gotten is watching one French movie "The Diving Bell and the Butterfly" (English title) on TV and keeping up with a Yale lecture entitled "France since 1871".

Yale, and a lot of other universities for that matter are offering free learning materials, recorded lectures, and transcripts from their classes. Some even as go far as to have online classes where you can earn a certificate after successful completion of the course. The Yale course I'm keeping up with is pretty interesting especially since I don't know too much about the history in question. The audio is less than stellar at times so I try to read the transcripts which can also be frustrating to read because when a person lectures there's a lot of "uhhs" "errs" and scattered thoughts in general. Not exactly ideal for smooth and easy reading.

I tried to access journal articles on this period that were listed in the course syllabus but most of them I won't have access to unless I pay, which in unfortunate. The Economist actually had an interesting article on academic publishing in which it explains how the companies that publishes articles in academic journals rip off those that fund the public research (taxpayers or charities) and those that provide its content (academics and universities). Here's the link to the article, I highly suggest reading it, it's not very long: Academic publishing: Open sesame, The Economist, April 12th 2012

Anyway, from the little that I've read/listened to so far in the Yale lecture, I've gotten a clear idea of why La Belle Époque was coined, which was a definite "ah-ha!" moment for me. La Belle Époque was named The Beautiful Era in large part because of the relative prosperity and peace of France from the 1890s to 1914. The Belle Époque was straddled between two devastating wars in French history: The Franco-Prussian War and WWI. So it makes sense that when the French looked back on the era in between these two wars, it was appreciated and exalted all the more. I didn't know anything about the Franco-Prussian war until I started reading/listening to the lecture by Professor John Merriman and only recently learned how WWI was such a blow to France. 

I had to take IAH201: US and the World online last spring to fulfill a GenEd requirement for graduation from MSU. In that class we read an article on the beginnings of study abroad programs in the United States and France was featured heavily. In one of the articles were testimonials from American students who studied abroad in France after WWI. Many of them commented upon the devastation that France faced after the war both in terms of lives lost and infrastructure. It really shook the nation at its core, in a way that it hadn't for the United States.

When I went to France this year I noticed that in every city and village you go to there's always a statue commemorating deaths from the wars France participated in, particularly WWI. These monuments can be anywhere - in the town center, in churches, in train stations. Today I randomly watched on YouTube an episode of "Who Do You Think You Are" (where famous people get their genealogies traced) featuring JK Rowling. She traced one branch of her family back to Alsace in Eastern France.It was revealed that her family had to choose whether to stay French citizens or become German citizens after Otto von Bismarck regained control of the area after the Franco-Prussian war. 

So in sum, I'm glad I'm learning about and connecting all these different facets of French history and society!

This is one example of the type of WWI memorial one can see all over France.  This particular memorial was inside a church in Nantes and the names were no doubt former parishioners. Photo Credit goes to my friend Hannah W.!

Fun Fact: At one point during the Siege of Paris the people began to use balloons to get letters in and out of the city. There were sixty-five balloon flights carrying two and a half million letters, weighing roughly about 20,000 pounds!