The Mona Lisa is bound for a new part of the Louvre, which if she were alive she would presumably be very happy about, even if no one would be able to tell for sure.
Her eyes have been following people around the room for so long that no one has stopped to think it could be the walls she’s looking at with that hint of disgust. Maybe she’s long fancied a change of scene.
Unveiled by Emmanuel Macron, the French president, earlier this year, the plan to give her a room of her own at the Paris museum seems wise on paper, though I fear the comings and goings will seed the kind of confusion that makes perfect heist-plot material and risks bringing Danny Ocean and his crew out of retirement for one last job.
As for that hint of disgust, researchers from the University of Amsterdam used emotion-recognition software in 2005 to quantify that the expression of the Mona Lisa, aka the Florentine noblewoman Lisa del Giocondo, nee Gherardini, is 9 per cent disgusted, 6 per cent fearful, 2 per cent angry, less than 1 per cent neutral and 83 per cent happy.
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I don’t have a precise breakdown of how staff at the Louvre feel, but this week’s abrupt work stoppage suggests they are not quite 83 per cent happy and are somewhat more than 2 per cent angry. The museum failed to open for several hours on Monday morning because a scheduled staff meeting turned into what one union representative called “a mass expression of exasperation”.
The source of this exasperation isn’t complicated. The Louvre is overcrowded, understaffed and crumbling, and workers aren’t the only ones to have noticed. Visiting it has become “a physical ordeal”, with “no space to take a break” and “insufficient” toilet and catering facilities, its director, Laurence des Cars, warned in a memo to France’s culture minister, Rachida Dati, in January.
Even its architecture is conspiring against it. The glass-and-steel pyramid entrance, completed in 1989, creates a “very inhospitable” greenhouse effect on hot days, while some areas suffer temperature variations that endanger the preservation of the artworks. And parts of the building are “no longer watertight”.
Soon after Le Parisien newspaper published this leaked memo about the leaky Louvre, Macron sprang into announcement mode, emptying the Salle des États – the room where the Mona Lisa currently resides – to reveal a renovation and expansion project dubbed its Nouvelle Renaissance.
The €800 million vision includes the addition of underground rooms, the construction of a new entrance near the river Seine and the relocation of Leonardo da Vinci’s masterpiece to a dedicated room accessible via an add-on to the main ticket.
I saw the Mona Lisa in January 2005. A few months later it was moved to a different spot and placed in a sealed enclosure made of bulletproof glass. This was unconnected to my visit.
What I remember about that trip to the Louvre is that Paris was freezing, so my expression by the time we reached the painting was likely 83 per cent relief just to be indoors. Another 10 per cent was probably fatigue from contemplating what felt like the majority of the Louvre’s 33,000 less-famous artworks along the way, and 7 per cent was weirdly prescient regret that proper smartphones hadn’t been invented yet. The great thing about the Mona Lisa is that it’s small enough for a selfie. I’m confident I could have fitted my big Irish head and the whole portrait into one frame.
I’m not now in the habit of taking selfies beside paintings, but a significant number of the near nine million people who visit the Louvre each year like to try. It doesn’t necessarily lessen their appreciation of 16th-century art. They might not have had any to start with. And if you’re paying €22 in, or €30 from 2026 if you’re a non-EU visitor, it is perhaps not entirely daft to want a record of your “ordeal”.
As for those who snap only the painting, they may have concluded that the Mona Lisa’s smile is enigmatic mainly because she is so tiny and far away. If they use their phones’ zoom function, they can get a closer look.
So don’t blame the customers, blame the infrastructure, and adjust your expectations accordingly, because unless the Louvre’s daily visitor cap is tightened, congestion and frustration seem inevitable for a while yet: the glaring flaw in Macron’s ambitious plan for a roomier museum is that it will take up to 10 years to complete.
My advice for anyone keen to absorb some Leonardo genius in the meantime is to choose Milan. Book well in advance and see The Last Supper instead. It beats the elbow-sharpening and neck-craning required to glimpse the Mona Lisa through a sea of screens – or, if you’re my height, a selection of armpits that elicit at least 9 per cent disgust.
