Paris 2016 - Cluny, Arts & Metiers Museums

Having visited the "must-see" Louvre and Orsay museums on our first visit to Paris, we chose some smaller, less popular museums for our "Off-the-Beaten-Path" tour on our third return trip to the city.  We had exhausted all the museums that we wanted to see in the 16th arrondissement where we were staying, so we finally ventured into the heart of the city, going to the 5th arrondissement to visit the Cluny Museum and the 3rd arrondissement to visit the Musée des Arts et Métiers.  It actually felt strange returning to the 5th since we were suddenly be in the midst of many other tourists after spending so much time in the outskirts of Paris.  Near Place Saint-Michel, Rich was so happy to find the cheesy hotdog that he enjoyed during our first trip to Paris.

We had previously resisted going to the Cluny Museum of Medieval Art since we knew that it wasn't really our thing.  But it happens to be the favourite museum of some friends of ours and they have been urging us to go.  So when we found out that we would be in Paris during the first Sunday of the month when admission to the Cluny is free, this seemed like the perfect opportunity.  We could check it out, see the highlights and if we still were not that interested, we would not have wasted any money.  As it turns out, we were right about our ambivalence towards Medieval art and raced through the museum quite quickly.  One of my favourite things about the Cluny was actually the clever cartoon graphics that were used to explain that the museum was under renovation.  I laughed out loud each time I saw another one, as they guided us towards the detoured entrance.

As expected, the first few rooms were filled with religious art in the form of sculptures, paintings and a magnificent altarpiece with intricate carvings in the centre.  We were intrigued by the sculpture of Christian martyr Saint Denis who is known for the miracle of walking 6 miles holding his decapitated head.  This particular rendition of the saint is interesting because of the faint red (blood?) stains that can be detected on his robe and headpiece.  The room with stained glass art continued with the themes of violence, depicting various scenes of torture and killing of martyrs.

The highlight of the Cluny Museum is the collection of six tapestries known as "The Lady and the Unicorn" that date back to the early 17th Century.  At first glance, the six giant weavings all look quite similar with the red Millefleur background and blue base.  Each tapestry depicts a lady accompanied by a lion on her left and a unicorn on her right.  The two animals either hold pennants or wear sashes bearing a coat of arms of the noble LeViste family.  Various birds, dogs, monkeys, bunnies and other animals are placed around the peripheral.

Upon closer observation, it can be discerned that five of the tapestries allude to the five senses of sight, hearing, touch, taste and smell, as reflected by the actions of either the lady or one of the animals.  The sixth tapestry includes a blue tent with the words "À Mon Seul Désir" written across the top (possibly translated as "my one and only desire" or "by my will only").   Many different interpretations have been attributed to this sixth tapestry, including the sixth sense of perception, or allusion to material wealth.  Personally, I think the poor Lion got shortchanged since he is just as prominently featured as the Unicorn in these tapestries but is not even mentioned in the the name of the collection.

I was quite interested with that the tapestry "Les Vendanges" (The Harvest), depicting the steps of making wine, from picking to pressing grapes and a first taste of the drink. The busy scenes were recreated in a tactile model that the visually impaired could touch and feel in order to get a sense of what the tapestry was about.  Braille descriptions accompanied this model.  I have heard about this wonderful offering but had not seen one personally until now.

The Musée des Arts et Métiers (Museum of Arts and Crafts) is a museum of technology, science and industrial design devoted to presenting French scientific inventions, designs and instruments dating back to the late 18th century when the museum was first founded.  We approached what we first thought was the museum entrance, but it turned out to be the National Conservatory of Arts and Crafts, which was the original owner of the collection of over 80,000 objects and 15,000 drawings, but is now a prestigious school of higher education.  Instead, the Museum of Arts and Crafts is partially housed in the Saint-Martin-des-Champs Abbey, an influential monastry in the Medieval times, as well as in an additional building added during a renovation in the 1990s.  About 3000 items from the vast collection are on display in the museum, which is divided into seven sections including Scientific Instruments, Materials, Energy, Mechanics, Construction, Communication, Transportation.

We started out in the Mechanics section where we perused an entire room full of contraptions with wheels, pulleys and levers with wooden or metal gears.  These were all 18th-19th century French contributions to the Industrial revolution. Some were models illustrating theoretical aspects of transmission and transformation of motion, while others had practical uses such as weaving or looming.  I was not really interested in these devices since they all looked the same to me and I didn't really understand how they worked.  I think I felt the same way in the Materials and Energy sections as well, although I didn't quite keep track of which section we were in.

I was much more enthralled with the "Théâtre des Automates", an enchanting collection 19th Century automatons, which are wind-up machines designed to automatically follow a predetermined sequence of operations. The brightly dressed and decorated mechanical robots in this exhibit perform prescribed movements such as playing a musical instrument,  performing acrobatic tricks, working a hand saw or riding a bicycle.  Although the automatons look like toys, the mechanical movements were quite complex and these were expensive objects in their day that were kept as valued collectors' items. Too bad we were not there at a time when we could watch a demonstration of the movements of these automatons.

There were many objects that I found interesting within the Communications section, including an Apple Lisa II computer (1984), an Opus video conferencing terminal (1989) that pre-dated the "webcam", an old-fashioned telephone (1944), a reel tape player (1930) and what looked like a record player that achieved stereophonic sound by playing two records at a time, each through its own large speaker.

I was intrigued by the late 19th Century Hughes printing telegraph developed by George Phelps that used a piano-like keyboard with the black sharp/flat keys representing letters A-N from left to right, and the white natural keys representing the letters O-Z plus a dot ('.') and space (' ') from right to left.  I also liked the "spy cameras" that were hidden in a watch, a cravat, a top hat and a book.  I'm not sure how the other cameras were operated, but the cravat was attached to a wire and a bulb that presumably was pressed to take the photos.

Léon Bollée's Direct Multiplication machine (1889) won the gold medal award at the Paris Exposition (World's Fair), for its ability to quickly multiply two numbers within seconds (as opposed to minutes for previous machines).  A fascinating video shows how this machine works.  Using levers and dials to set the values of the multiplicand and multiplier, the machine manipulates a series of metal bars of different heights to produce the product.  Unlike previous machines which simulated multiplication through a series of additions or subtractions, this machine directly performed the operation.

Moving on to the Transportation section, we saw Nicolas-Joseph Cugnot's 1770 steam powered vehicle named the "Fardier à Vapeur", known as the first working self-propelled mechanical vehicle. Intended to transport artillery for the army, the vehicle had two wheels in the back and one in the front, weighed 2.5 tonnes and traveled 2.25 miles per hour.  However the Fardier had poor weight distribution and steering, making it unreliable.  An unsubstantiated anecdote suggests that it caused the first automobile accident when it crashed into a wall.  A hilarious video is shown to illustrate what might have happened in the accident, possibly using a reproduction of the Fardier, which was built in 2010.  You can watch this Youtube video to see this reproduction in action and get a better idea of how the Fardier would have worked.

One of the highlights of the Musée des Arts et Métiers was Clément Ader's 1897 steam-powered Avion III, a flying machine made of wood and linen with wings modeled after a bat and propeller blades resembling bird feathers, trying to imitate animals that could fly.  The plane was powered by a relatively light-weight steam engine fueled by kerosene.  Despite building three models of the airplane, Ader was unable to make any of them fly.  The best he achieved was a short taxi down a runway followed by a 50 metre "hop" at a height of 20 centimetres.

So far all the exhibits that we had seen were in the new addition of the museum.  Now we finally stepped into the nave of the ancient Saint-Martin-Des-Champs chapel and were amazed by what was before us.  Three historically significant airplanes are hung from the ceiling, while vintage vehicles and even a model of the Statue of Liberty are placed on platforms of varying heights leading up into the rafters.  A spiral ramp and stairs allow you to climb upwards in order to get closer views of the items on display.  This was a really impressive use of space, using the height of the tall, narrow chapel to maximize opportunities to show more of the collection.

Being an airplane enthusiast, Rich was quite excited to inspect the historically significant planes in the collection.  There was the 1911 Breguet No. 40 biplane which made the first long distance flight between Casablanca to Fez in Morocco.  The 1906 Esnault-Pelterie REP I was one of first planes to use the joystick as its main flight control mechanism.  The 1909 Blériot  XI monoplane was used to make the first crossing of the English Channel, taking 35 minutes for the trip.  It was great to be able to see these planes in the air as if they were in flight but still be so close to them.

Finally, we saw French physicist Léon Foucault's pendulum, a device invented in 1851 which demonstrates the rotation of the earth using laboratory apparatus and measurements as opposed to astronomical observations.  The device consists of a 28km brass ball suspended by a long wire cable.  If you start the pendulum swinging in one direction, eventually you will notice that it seems to have changed directions when actually it is the earth that has rotated relative to the pendulum.  Foucault also invented the gyroscope as another means to measure or maintain orientation and thus visualize the Earth's rotation.

Although we got off to a slow start, we ended up seeing many very interesting exhibits at the Musée des Arts et Métiers.  I can't say that I understood the science behind many of the things that we saw, but it was still fun learning about them.