Created between 1503 and 1506 by Leonardo da Vinci, the Mona Lisa is one of the most famous paintings in the world. But it is also, according to a recent survey carried out by the coupon and discount website CouponBirds, the most disappointing work of art in the world in the eyes of tourists. The reason ? It is very simple: faced with the crowds that rush every day to see it in the Salle des Estates, the largest room in the museum, it is difficult to really have the time to contemplate it and understand why it fascinates so much.
If Mona Lisa has always been an object of tourist curiosity, this mystical work is above all today the very symbol of hyper-tourism. We go to the Louvre to see the Mona Lisa. We didn’t see anything, but we were there. If you are one of the 7.3 million people who go to the Louvre Museum each year to see the Mona Lisa, you know that the experience does not live up to our expectations: you wait in line for long minutes and once you arrive at his height, you only have a few minutes to see him elbowing behind a forest of selfie sticks, before security guards politely ask you to move to make way to the many other tourists who came to take their selfie with Mona Lisa.
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An expensive move
And if tourists complain about it, for the Louvre it is a real headache to organize a route which allows a hassle-free visit to this vast museum which has no less than 38,000 works divided into eight departments, three wings and 80,000 m2 of exhibition space. Faced with this problem, the idea of moving the Mona Lisa to a room that would be entirely dedicated to it emerged in 2019. At the time, opinions differed and it was decided to try to make the experience better by changing the paint on the walls of the room and rethinking the lighting and circulation in order to better highlight the Mona Lisa.
But a few years later, the question of moving the Mona Lisa came back to the table. Laurence des Cars, director of the Parisian museum, is aware of the problem: “We do not welcome visitors in this room, and therefore, we have the feeling that we are doing our job poorly.” She therefore proposes “move Mona Lisa to a separate room”what “could put an end to public disappointment”. Gaël Brustier, political science researcher and specialist in the right and the cultural dimensions of politics, already mentioned this idea last summer in Slate: “The Mona Lisa holds an important place within the Louvre, but the tourist economy, since itIt is about it that the museum management seems to think above all, would perhaps benefit from providing a separate room, a separate ticket office, in order to restore greater importance to its museum function, unfortunately somewhat obscured by its tendency to commodification”.
This Thursday, April 25, the Council of State, the highest administrative jurisdiction, met following a request from the International Restitutions association, requesting the “restitution” of Leonardo da Vinci’s masterpiece, as reported by TV5 Monde . This in fact demands that the Mona Lisa be removed from the museum’s inventory. The association justified its request by declaring that it was acting in the interest “descendants of the painter’s heirs”. The Mona Lisa has been at the Louvre since 1797 and she has only left the famous museum once since, during a theft in 1911. This far-fetched request cannot therefore succeed, especially since we know that the This association is not its first attempt. And each time, the Council of State rejected the requests. In its previous decision, set to set a precedent, the Council of State declared that the association had not “quality to act”. “Only people who consider themselves to be the legitimate owners” of the work, were legitimate to submit a request. However, from 1516, the Mona Lisa was the property of King Francis I, to whom Leonard da Vinci offered the painting in exchange for his protection. The portrait of Mona Lisa entered the royal collections and then the public collections.
Although she should not leave France, she could nevertheless move to the Louvre. This new space would be located in the basement of the Louvre. A renovation project which would also involve having to think about a new entrance to the Louvre Palace. In short, so many constraints which would require a budget of 500 million euros. An ambitious project that would appease the crowds and perhaps put a smile back on Mona Lisa’s face…
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