Mona Lisa to get her own room as overcrowded Louvre expands

PARIS – The Louvre Museum in Paris will move the Mona Lisa to a newly created exhibition space, President Emmanuel Macron of France announced on Jan 28 as he unveiled plans to expand and renovate the world’s biggest and most-visited museum.

Speaking in front of Leonardo da Vinci’s 16th-century masterpiece itself, Mr Macron also said the Louvre would create a new entrance in its easternmost facade to alleviate overcrowding at the museum, which is swarmed by nearly nine million visitors every year.

The vast renovation would be paid for partly by increasing ticket prices for visitors from non-European Union countries, starting in 2026, Mr Macron said.

Already, the museum has capped daily attendance at 30,000 people, who mostly enter via the Louvre Pyramid, a glass-and-steel structure designed by architect I.M. Pei in the 1980s during the museum’s last major overhaul. The entrance was intended to welcome half the visitors it currently does.

An estimated 80 per cent of those crowds come for the Mona Lisa – a magnet for droves of selfie-snapping tourists that has become a crowd-control headache.

Mr Macron said the dedicated room for the Mona Lisa would be one of several new exhibition spaces created underneath the Cour Carree, the Louvre’s easternmost courtyard, and connected to the existing museum. The Mona Lisa would be accessible separately from the rest of the museum, he added, with its own ticket.

The massive renovations announced by Mr Macron come at a delicate time for France, which has been mired in political turmoil and is currently facing intense belt-tightening in public finances. The new entrance would be paid for by the museum’s own funds, Mr Macron said, although he did not provide a detailed breakdown of the overall renovation costs.

The Louvre – a former palace that was home to French kings until 1682 – is much more than a tourist attraction. It is a symbol of France’s cultural clout, and an important soft-power instrument for the French state.

Mr Macron’s announcement came less than a week after the daily newspaper Le Parisien reported that Ms Laurence des Cars, the Louvre’s president, had warned in a confidential memo to the French culture ministry that the museum was in desperate need of a revamp because of significant wear and tear.

Problems outlined in the memo included water leaks, temperature variations that endangered artworks, insufficient restrooms and food facilities, and poor signage. The memo also warned that the glass pyramid was structurally outdated – overheated during the summer and too noisy year-round.

The museum has an annual budget of nearly US$300 million (S$405 million), most of which comes from its own resources like ticket sales and brand licensing, with about a third funded by the French state.

Mr Julien Lacaze, president of Sites et Monuments, said the museum was hardly falling apart, but needed to better manage the flow of visitors, who elbow past one another to see the Mona Lisa or the Venus de Milo, and often leave rooms full of other masterpieces near empty.

He adds the museum should do more to promote its vast collection – nearly 500,000 pieces, of which only about 30,000 are on display – in order to peel visitors away from the buzziest attractions. NYTIMES