The Mona Lisa is essential and cumbersome, cherished and criticized, so exceptional that the Louvre plans to move it and build a separate room for it in the building. For her alone. Saturday April 27 on France Inter, Laurence des Cars, the president of the museum, confirmed information from Figaro, revealed a few days earlier. And it’s a state affair.
Eighty percent of the approximately nine million visitors per year come first to Mona Lisa. Around 20,000 people per day, a crazy number. To find it, you have to follow a pilgrimage that wanders between the walls, ignoring a host of masterpieces on the way, including four other Leonardo da Vinci, while generating a painful background noise. The rest of the kings’ palace is silent.
The Mona Lisa takes shelter in the Salle des Estates, where visitors meander as if they were in an airport before submitting a cabin baggage to X-rays. In front of the work, they finally think of facing Monna’s gaze, but, kept at a distance, they just see the face yellowed by the varnish and protected by armored glass.
All vampirized
“We don’t see anything there”, wrote the art historian Daniel Arasse. We see Monna less well than in a book or on the Internet. We no longer have the mind to look at the other paintings in the room, the monumental Wedding at Canaby Veronese, or other Venetian masters, Titian in the lead, all vampirized by an icon which does not ask for so much.
When, on France Inter, we pointed out to him that visitors to The Mona Lisa see above all a forest of selfies, Laurence des Cars concedes a ” Yes “ contrite. This episode echoes a study among tourists carried out by CouponBirds, a platform offering discounts for entering international museums, and relayed on March 21 by The Parisian. The result is clear: The Mona Lisa would be “the most disappointing masterpiece in the world”. It is not the painting that disappoints, but the conditions of its discovery.
This study is as impressionistic as a Monet painting, but the problem is very real. Moreover, this is not the first time that the Louvre has “considered” moving its emblem, but today the spirits seem ready.
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It’s less about saving The Mona Lisa – its fate is sealed by overtourism – that the other works, eclipsed and polluted by the flagship painting, and to relieve a palace of kings subjected to severe test. To achieve this, Laurence des Cars intends to move the lines without donning revolutionary clothing. Find “the right balance” between maintaining a massive audience and improving the visit.
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