1 day ago
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What a wonderful headache for a museum to have. The Louvre in Paris gets so many visitors it is taking drastic measures to cope, which include moving its most famous treasure to a dedicated space where fans can visit without entering the main museum at all. It will no longer suck the oxygen from other art. Nearly 9 million visitors a year stream through the Louvre and it’s believed 80% of them are looking for Leonardo da Vinci’s portrait of Lisa Gherardini del Giocondo, better known as La Gioconde, better still as the Mona Lisa.
I’m worried the Louvre is trying to solve a problem that is not really a problem. Ask Britain’s museums if high visitor numbers are a bad thing: they still haven’t recovered their pre-pandemic crowds. The decision, dramatically announced by Emmanuel Macron, to move the Mona Lisa to a special hygienically isolated gallery where les idiots who flock to take selfies in front of it won’t bother more cultured visitors who wish to study art in a hushed atmosphere, is a misguided act of snobbery. It may ruin the Louvre’s ecosystem as a place where high art becomes popular culture.
On my last visit to the Louvre, I made a beeline to see Leonardo’s masterpiece. Why wouldn’t I? To get to it, after the security controls to enter the court under the glass pyramid, you go through the Denon wing, choosing one of several paths – maybe past the Victory of Samothrace or Gericault’s Raft of the Medusa – until you reach the room where the Mona Lisa is sealed behind plateglass.
It’s rowdy. Barriers hold back the crowd, many of whom do seem to be fixated on getting photos. But who am I, and who is Macron, to assume none of those people feel or see or discover anything from the experience? Noise and jostling there was, but I was still able to see Leonardo’s painting, a silent mystery at the heart of the hubbub. Her smile, in person, is so much warmer than it looks in reproduction. I realised, more clearly than ever before, this really is a sweet portrait of an ordinary person who posed for Leonardo in Florence in 1503 – and made a magical impression on him.
It’s true the Mona Lisa makes it hard to pay attention to the paintings by Veronese, Titian and others in the same room. But that’s not because of the crowds. It’s the Mona Lisa that does this by being so compelling.
In my experience, the crowds don’t spoil the Louvre. They give it life. Another measure that is planned – opening up a new entrance – sounds more useful as it can be a slow queue getting into IM Pei’s pyramid. But once you’re in, the vastness of this museum gives it an exhilarating impression of limitless riches. There are always plenty of visitors in the gallery of French history paintings. Others traipse past Botticelli frescoes, Caravaggio canvases – not to mention Leonardo da Vinci’s other paintings in the collection.
If you want peace in the Louvre seek out its northern Renaissance galleries or its collection of Chardin still life scenes. Better still, go downstairs from the Mona Lisa where people walk by Michelangelo’s Dying and Rebellious Slaves with barely a glance. You can look at these masterpieces in peace.
