The Mona Lisa by Leonardo da Vinci
French President Emmanuel Macron announced that the Louvre will undergo extensive renovations, including placing the Mona Lisa in its own gallery, for which visitors will be charged extra.
The Louvre is home to roughly half a million works of art and attracts far more visitors than it is designed to receive. In 2024, 8.7 million people walked through the museum doors. While this made it the most-visited museum in the world, it doesn’t even come close to its attendance record. That was set in 2018 when the Louvre attracted 10.2 million visitors. Some have estimated that the repurposed palace can only reasonably entertain 4 million people per year. The Louvre president, Laurence des Cars, has tried to ease the burden on the museum and its staff by limiting daily visitorship to 30,000.
The French news network BFM estimates that renovating the Louvre could cost as much as €500 million. Other estimates put the cost as high as €800 million. While some sections of the Louvre have been redone recently, the last time the museum was extensively renovated was in the 1980s. Much of the future cost would involve building a new entrance by the River Seine to ease the crowding by I.M. Pei’s glass pyramid. Similar to the new Spanish Royal Collection building, there has also been talk of creating new galleries below ground. In a city as old and densely populated as Paris, it’s understandable since expanding outward can often be difficult, costly, and time-consuming. The renovations are estimated to take ten years, with design competitions scheduled for the next few months. Also mentioned is a separate wing exclusively for the Mona Lisa, the museum‘s greatest attraction. It’s somewhat sad to think that Veronese’s Wedding Feast at Cana, the largest painting in the museum, has millions of backs turned to it each year because it stands directly across the gallery from that unassuming Da Vinci portrait. So, giving the Mona Lisa its own gallery makes some sense. No details have been given on how a new Mona Lisa gallery would be organized. Perhaps they should do so in pairs according to height. You walk by at a reasonable pace and are encouraged not to linger to ensure that no one is boxed out. Shorter people would not be kept from viewing the painting, there would be no ridiculous crowds, nor would there be any need for selfie sticks. Of course, I’m not saying that viewing the Mona Lisa should carry the same solemnity as visiting someone’s mausoleum. But still…
Of course, the idea of tagging on an extra fee just to see the Mona Lisa is a bit of a double-edged sword. Logically, a ticket to enter the Louvre is, essentially, a ticket to view the Mona Lisa. As the star attraction of the museum, it seems rather superfluous. However, this could prove rather attractive to Paris locals or to other returning visitors who have likely already seen the Mona Lisa on a previous visit. Now, they can view the works by David and Géricault or the antiquities while having ample space to breathe, away from the throngs of tourists who are only there for one painting.