Journey to the middle of the Earth on the Louvre-Lens | EUROtoday
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HASnrooted within the mining previous of Hauts-de-France, the Louvre-Lens museum gives an exhibition devoted to… underground worlds! Well seen ! From the primary mines to Plato's cave, from the subway tubes to the key bases of James Bond novels, the fascination of the abyss, the cave, the buried underworlds has continued to gas the creativeness with scary but additionally consoling tales. Death and fertility, science and thriller, supply of rivers and lair of dragons, opposing mythologies unfold between nature and tradition.
Further afield, the depths of the planet have given rise to a number of spiritual projections. The Egyptian god Osiris triumphs over his dying and returns lavish in choices. On the rivers of the Greek underworld, the Lethe and the Styx, mortals had been welcomed by the boatman Charon – the exhibition presents a vase from 425 BC celebrating his skiff – who took them in the direction of the horrible Hades.
But if Orpheus emerges a widower of Eurydice, the goddess of Mother Earth, Demeter, delivers her daughter Persephone, restoring sap and fertility to nature. And if a portray by Burne-Jones celebrates gushing and very important water, a assure of regeneration, a portray by John Martin takes us again to Pandemonium, capital of the underworld, consonant with the abominable bestiary and specters of the Japanese Hokusai, however contrasting with the serene Bardo of Tibetan Buddhism. The lair of the Sibyl of Cumae, the cave of Homer's Cyclops represented so many threatening cavities: a canvas by Courbet painted in 1873, View of the giants' caveextends the legend.
Myth echoes actuality
In the submerged cities of Atlantis, the tales of myths echo the realities of human geography. Cultual however actual, the mastabas of the Valley of the Kings, the underground lairs of the bull god Mithras, the catacombs and the sacred necropolises. Place of burials, the underground world can also be that of troglodyte refuges, sheltering each the bandit Mandrin and the Protestants of the Desert.
But the cave will also be landscaped: if legend locates the lodging of nymphs and fairies there, the princes of Europe arrange poeticized lairs of their domains, which works from the decorative hermits of the 18the English century to the underground lake of such a fortress of Ludwig II of Bavaria.
As a mirrored image, the vogue for cupboards of curiosities emerged, with their uncommon ores, their exhumed fossils, their excavated historic stays, the emergence of Pompeii resonating just like the astonishing revelation of a ghost metropolis, and the appearance of an period of scientific excavations.
The nineteenthe century will recharge the batteries of the creativeness. The necrophilia tales of Edgar Poe, the Journey to the Center of the Earth by Jules Verne, along with his prehistoric world, in addition to the underground universe ofAlice in Wonderlandruled by a card-playing Queen Victoria, a prelude to the monsters of the depths that Lovecraft imagined round 1925, opening the sector to a complete creativeness that Marvel movies proceed to copy as we speak, such the barbarity of monstrous creatures It usually comes from desecrated depths.
Germinal, Nazism and “The Great Escape”
But these drillings of fiction echo in actuality with harsher exploitations. In this area of former mining basins, the Louvre-Lens exhibition finds its existential and typically tragic notice with the evocation of this Chasm that Mucha painted in 1898, the one the place the mine employees descend, digging galleries, attacking the coal seams with pickaxes, helmeted heroes uncovered to the blows of firedamp, just like the Émile Zola of Germinal the indignant chronicler will say.
Under Nazism, it grew to become darker with these tunnels the place the sacrificed helots from the Dora camp labored on the machining of secret weapons. Modern struggle had arrived, which for the outdated underground passages of fortified castles and the undermining of Vauban sieges had changed the ditch, a sacrificial place sheltering for years the casemates of dying, in addition to the work of Otto Dix or the engravings of Vallotton bear witness to this.
READ ALSO Immerse your self within the coronary heart of pharaonic civilization within the coronary heart of ParisWho says seclusion additionally says escape, with the doable recourse of the tunnel, the one which the convict digsA dying row inmate escaped by Robert Bresson, just like the prisoners surrounding Steve McQueen of The nice Escape. This makeshift conduit is nothing in comparison with up to date ambiguities: domesticated, the underground world has develop into that of cellars, warehouses and large silos, which might home museum reserves in addition to North Korean warheads.
If renovated sewers make sure the sanitation of metropolises, does a sure excavating insanity not are likely to exhaust the sources of Gaia, aka Mother Earth? The Lens exhibition however gives a notice of freshness with an set up by Eva Jospin, Nymphaea : within the historic world, it was a cave from which a spring devoted to nymphs gushed. Where are they ?
“Underworlds”till July 22 on the Louvre-Lens99, rue Paul-Bert, 62300 Lens.
https://www.lepoint.fr/culture/voyage-au-centre-de-la-terre-au-louvre-lens-31-03-2024-2556388_3.php