Mona Lisa to Get Her Own Room in Revamped and Enlarged Louvre
141Jan. 29, 2025
French president Emmanuel Macron today detailed plans for a major renovation and expansion of theLouvrein Paris and revealed that Leonardo da Vinci’sMona Lisawill go on view in a dedicated chamber there.Speaking in front of the masterwork, Macron told those assembled that the painting would be displayed in a new gallery to be built beneath the Cour Carrée, the museum’s easternmost courtyard, and that it would be presented as a separate attraction, with its own ticket. The announcement followed theleak last weekof a confidential memo from Louvre president Laurence des Cars detailing the state of disrepair into which the world’s most visited museum had fallen; that information spurred a regional Italian official tosuggestthe legendary work be housed in Milan while the Louvre dealt with its situation, brought on in part by years of overcrowding.
The announced renovations embrace Des Cars’ssuggestion, made last spring, that the Mona Lisa be moved to an underground chamber. Titled Louvre New Renaissance and paid for in part by a newly revealed 2026 increase in ticket prices for visitors from non-European Union countries, the plan is aimed at allowing the Louvre, which welcomed some 8.7 million attendees last year, to accommodate 12 million visitors annually. Among the outlined changes are new galleries adjacent to the one devoted to the Mona Lisa; repairs to aging infrastructure that will address temperature-control and water-damage issues; and a new entranceway, whose addition is expected to lessen the overcrowding at I.M. Pei’s iconic Pyramid. Completed in the 1980s as part of the Louvre’s last major facelift, the glass-and-steel structure was designed to handle only about half the traffic it receives today. Macron affirmed that the French culture ministry will launch an international architectural competition to determine who will design the entrance, and estimated that the entire project would be completed by 2031.