Bordeaux – Musée d’Aquitaine

On a rainy July morning, earlier this year, Thérèse and I spent several hours at the Musée d’Aquitaine in Bordeaux.  

One of the things we focussed on, when viewing the statuary, was hands, or lack of them. This is because we had visited the Portraits de Cézanne exhibition at the Musée d’Orsay in Paris a few days earlier and had been disappointed at Cézanne’s treatment of hands – we decided we prefer him as a landscape artist. Here are some of the objects we lingered over and discussed at the Musée d’Aquitaine:

Famille de Cinctagnatus [I have been unable to verify the spelling]. The man and woman in this family group are holding right hands as a symbol of their union. Between the couple, his head missing, is their child.

A bas-relief Nativité, 1380-1420. This focuses on different aspects of the nativity to what we are accustomed to seeing. In the top half, the Virgin Mary is shown pregnant, covered by a blanket that falls in heavy folds, and she is helped by a midwife who is placing her hands on her body. In the bottom half, Joseph, bare-footed, is leaning on a stick, his hands crossed. A second midwife is holding the infant Jesus. 

This hand and arm has broken off from its source and is weathered with age ...

... but it made me think of an exhibition I had seen the week before in Paris -- the Rodin exhibition at the Grand Palais. From the 1880s onwards, Rodin experimented with isolating and sculpting particular parts of the body (he often recomposed them in unexpected combinations). This plaster model, done in about 1908 is an enlargement of a work done in 1906-1907, the right hand of la muse Whistler. 

The next picture shows a statue of Hercules. A member of the museum staff, who was on guardian-of-the-treasures duties but clearly wanted some conversation, approached Thérèse and me and explained the statue. He said it was discovered in an égout (sewer) in the Place Saint-Pierre in 1832, broken into more than twenty pieces; and that despite the missing parts, Hercules is identifiable due to the lion skin rolled around his left forearm. Hercules is portrayed in his nudité héroique, with powerful musculature.

This statue of Jupiter holding his sceptre (symbolic ornamental staff) has been dated from the third quarter of the 1^st century. The Museum’s website http://www.musee-aquitaine-bordeaux.fr/ talks of Jupiter's thick and abundant hair held by a band from which curls escape around his face; his opulent beard that adds to the vigour of a determined chin; the stance, with one leg slightly bent; and his appearance as a man in the prime of his life, which command the respect of the viewer.

It is possible to absorb only so much when visiting a museum, and so, partway through our time at the Musée d’Aquitaine, Thérèse and I retrieved our wet-weather gear from the coat check and went out for coffee. Thérèse remembered seeing a cafe with books on shelves, which she thought I would enjoy; it was near a tiny shop that sold carnival costumes. This proved not to be quite the correct location, but we found the café. 

Thérèse and I took photos of each other, and here I am with my coffee, and the plate of quenelles just out of sight. The large books, on the top row behind me to the left, are a limited edition series, produced some years ago, about countries of the world. I enjoyed browsing the book on Cuba, a country that Bill and I visited in 2009; it included some fine line drawings, including one of Fidel Castro who was very handsome in his younger days.

I shall conclude with a photo of a tile from the period when Aquitaine was a romanised province:

Blog by Ann Barrie