Amanda Seyfried Ponders the Pastoral Life on an After-Hours Stroll Via the Louvre

“I’m wondering how significantly she takes us,” Amanda Seyfried whispers, referring to the big-name celeb quietly smirking throughout the room. The lady strikes me because the silent-judging kind, however Seyfried is extra open-minded. “It’s judgment,” the actor considers, “or it’s simply harmless curiosity.” In any case, it’s not on daily basis that Lisa Gherardini, higher often called the selfie-magnet Mona Lisa, will get a near-private viewers with an Oscar nominee—a startling magnificence identified to show up on Lancôme billboards and journal covers. “How huge is that, dimension-wise?” Seyfried wonders about Da Vinci’s Sixteenth-century portray, encased in bulletproof glass. A close-by voice ballparks it at 36 by 24 inches, which seems like the beginning of a bust-waist-hips measurement. “‘36, 25, 34’—was that from a Nelly tune?” Seyfried asks, earlier than supplying her personal melodic reply with a line from the rapper’s Y2K anthem: “If you wish to go and take a trip with me…” One imagines Lisa the wallflower, having seen and heard all of it, softly buzzing alongside. A nostalgic hit has its sweetness, but in addition its flaws. “That was purported to depict the proper feminine type,” says Seyfried, “which is clearly bullshit.” 

The matter of idealized magnificence—learn how to outline it, and, extra essential, redefine it—is a recurring theme on the Louvre on a balmy Tuesday night, the place a crowd of a whole lot has gathered below I. M. Pei’s glass pyramid to fete the museum’s partnership with Lancôme. Spindly show stands showcase the limited-edition eye palette, its embossed shadows impressed by an 1836 bust of the traditional Greek poet Corinne. Close by, bottles of Superior Génifique serum (a conservator’s method to preservation) occupy a set of black pedestals; lipsticks in fake marble instances sit on gold ones. In the meantime, 4 of the wonder model’s ambassadors—Seyfried, together with Zendaya, Chinese language mannequin He Cong, and Malian-French musician Aya Nakamura—have taken their very own locations on the partitions, by the use of mural-size marketing campaign pictures that pair every girl with an emblematic paintings. A few of the statues are unmistakable, like The Winged Victory of Samothrace, which Zendaya mirrors with an outstretched arm. Seyfried, whose Catskills farm has been a refuge for the previous decade, finds her muse within the Diana of Gabii, a Greek tribute to the goddess of the hunt. The larger-than-life determine—as soon as a jewel within the Borghese assortment and later Napoleon’s—has lengthy been a well-liked woman. So is Seyfried, whose vivid pink Prada gown acts like a homing beacon for almost each fan and pal.

On the floor, the co-branded assortment may appear to be an uncommon rendezvous for the 2 heritage establishments. “It’s not! It’s so refined, it’s so particular, it’s so well-curated,” Seyfried counters, as she slips out of cocktail hour for the non-public tour. “The factor about museums is you go there to get misplaced and also you go there to get discovered, to search out your self,” she says—one thing that magnificence, with its instruments for transformation, can faucet into as effectively. The actor pauses in a spacious room the place Ingres’s 1814 La Grande Odalisque slyly holds court docket. “I really like people, I really like these legendary snapshots—however landscapes,” she sighs in entrance of Paul Flandrin’s 1838 Montagnes de la Sabine, a lush, unassuming portray with simply the trace of artifical intervention, particularly the cluster of figures close to the underside and a columned temple hidden within the bushes. Past an aesthetic expertise, these galleries maintain the likelihood for connection, as Seyfried sees it, an opportunity to construct a cross-generational bridge. (Movie does too, which has the actor alluding to the continued SAG-AFTRA strike—a consequence of artists “being taken with no consideration and virtually disrespected, in some methods, due to monetary issues.”)

However it’s the classical statuary that we’re beelining for. The majestic Winged Victory, occupying a solitary perch on a stair touchdown, is all flash-frozen energy. “You’re feeling the area, you are feeling the likelihood,” Seyfried says of that potential ready to be set unfastened. A brief stroll on, the Venus de Milo will get an intimately scaled gallery to herself. Out of the blue a barnyard braying emanates from the actor’s night bag. “That’s my donkey!” Seyfried chirps, scurrying to her cellphone. (Technically talking, it’s not her precise donkey on the recording, however a ringtone stand-in for logistical ease.) She solutions the FaceTime name by placing a nonchalant pose with Venus. “Tommy? Oh, no huge deal. We’re actually strolling across the Louvre proper now,” she says to her husband, Thomas Sadoski. A tiny voice belonging to their 3-year-old son pipes in. “I don’t have your toy, Bubba,” Seyfried cajoles, with one final try at a grand gesture: “That is artwork! That is historical past!” Somebody within the group suggests a child-size Venus de Milo as a memento. “I’ve already received him an alien and a automotive,” she says. “Approach higher than this.” 

Seyfried is aware of what she desires, as evidenced by the life she has constructed round household (her daughter is 6) and nature. Two new horses have settled in on the farm this week, which brings the menagerie tally—she pauses to rely in her head—to “16 huge animals, not counting the chickens and the geese.” It’s largely an equine combine, together with the donkey, pony, and miniature horses, plus goats. It is sensible {that a} girl of the land feels a kinship with this marble Diana, caught in a self-sufficient second as she fastens her cloak. Within the press notes for the Lancôme x Louvre assortment, Seyfried calls her a “wild goddess,” regardless of an outwardly delicate look. “Claiming her personal independence: that’s the place her magnificence comes from.”