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| Crowds in front of the Mona Lisa in the Medici Gallery on Monday |
PARIS — The Mona Lisa gets around.
In 1516, she was lugged out of Italy on the back of a mule by Leonardo da Vinci and ended up in France, where she became royal property. She lived for a time at the Palace of Versailles, then moved permanently to the Louvre Museum. That stay was interrupted in 1911, when a thief snatched her off the walls and kept her for two years in his Paris apartment before he was caught trying to sell her in Florence.
Now, the Mona Lisa is on the move again. And while it’s only a temporary relocation — from one wing of the Louvre to another — it’s causing commotion here.
The Salle des États, where the painting has hung since 2005, is being renovated in time for the October opening of an exhibition commemorating the 500th anniversary of Leonardo’s death. So since July 17 the portrait has been installed in a protective case on a temporary wall in another gallery.
The difference is that there’s only one way in — up three escalators and through a single doorway — and 30,000 visitors a day to accommodate. The museum has spread the word that it is “exceptionally busy,” and that only prebooked tickets guarantee entry.
Once they get past the metal detectors, ticket holders are herded like sheep in a long, coiling line. They shuffle up escalators until they reach the Mona Lisa’s skylit new digs: the Medici Gallery, named after a striking series of wall-to-wall paintings by Rubens also on display there.
Not that anybody notices the Rubens works. As if in an airport check-in area, dozens of visitors rowdily wait their turn in another snaking line. Armed with smartphones, selfie sticks and cameras, they then rush into the final stretch — the Mona Lisa viewing pen. They have roughly one minute there before the guards shoo them away.
“I need more time to watch the Mona Lisa,” said Jongchan Lee, a Korean mechanical engineer who had just seen the masterpiece for the first time. “There are so many people in there. So the guards are pushing us to go, go, go. That’s not really good.”
