The “Mona Lisa”, by Leonardo da Vinci, could be moved to the basement, in an attempt not to disappoint tourists who cannot admire it in good conditions, informs The Telegraph, according to News.ro.
The director of the Louvre Museum, Laurence des Cars, recently suggested moving the popular work of art to a dedicated room built in the basement of the institution.
“We don’t get visitors very well in this room, so we feel like we’re not doing our job properly,” he told staff and supervisors. “Moving the Mona Lisa to a separate room could end public disappointment.”
“We’ve been thinking about this for a long time, but this time everyone agrees,” Vincent Delieuvin, the Louvre’s chief curator of 16th-century Italian painting, told Le Figaro.
“It’s a big room and the Mona Lisa is in the back, behind its security glass, so at first glance it looks like a postage stamp,” he said.
The Louvre receives nine million visitors annually, and according to museum officials, the Mona Lisa is the main attraction for 80% of these people. “On particularly crowded days, 250,000 people stand in the same line that my mother and I stood in.”
The popularity of the painting prompted other attempts to improve the viewing experience, including a painting of the gallery walls from eggshell yellow to midnight blue in 2019, as well as a change to the visitor queuing system.
But Delieuvin said the impact of social media and mass tourism meant a greater effort was needed, especially after its theft in 1911 when the artwork’s fame grew.
“Nowadays, it’s a must-see that everyone talks about at least once in their lifetime, and the Mona Lisa is clearly one of those ‘must-sees,'” said the curator.
A new underground painting room is to be part of an upcoming renovation of the “Grand Louvre” with a new entrance to the museum. Visitors would bypass the glass pyramid entrance and be led directly into underground rooms: one for the “Mona Lisa” and the other for temporary exhibitions.
“The atmosphere in the museum is now favorable,” said des Cars. “We have to accept the painting’s status as a global symbol, which is beyond our control.”
The budget for the renovation of the Louvre is estimated at 500 million euros, according to Le Figaro. But the French economy performed worse than expected on debt and deficit, prompting President Emmanuel Macron’s government to try to cut state spending by 25 billion euros in the next annual budget.
The Mona Lisa was also the target of a protest in January after activists threw pumpkin soup at it. The painting did not suffer any damage, but the incident was denounced by the Minister of Culture Rachida Dati as an attack on French heritage.
