After Her Trip to Another Gallery Sowed Chaos, Mona Lisa Is Back in Her Home at the Louvre—Only It’s Gotten a Complete Makeover

The Mona Lisa‘s home
has gotten a makeover.

The Louvre’s most famous
painting was reinstalled in its longtime gallery in the
museum’s Salle des États overnight on Monday. The Leonardo da
Vinci masterpiece had been on a staycation in another room,
the Galerie Médicis, for a rocky two months
while her permanent residence underwent
renovations. 

The gallery now looks quite a
bit different than it did before the Mona Lisa left. The
walls have been repainted in midnight blue, a color that
complements Leonardo’s famous painting better than the previous
yellow tone. The painting has also been given a brand new vitrine
so that visitors can get an even clearer view than
before.

Mona Lisa‘s brief sojourn outside the gallery wreaked
havoc on the museum. When the painting was relocated to its temporary
display in July, tour guides reported two-hour waits with long
lines forming outside the gallery’s single entrance. As chaos
mounted, ticketed visitors without reserved time slots were turned
away from the museum.

To avoid a similar crush of
people and smart phones in the renovated gallery, the Louvre has
introduced a new crowd-control system, implementing two single-file
lines leading up to the work during crowded
periods. 

“There will be two serpentine
lines that will allow the audience to get as close as possible to
the work, and for everyone to have a special moment with the
Mona Lisa,” a Louvre staffer told the French
publication Europe
1, explaining that,
on average, a visitor stays in front of the work for 50
seconds. The new system will particularly help children and
people with reduced mobility, who represent 18 percent of visitors,
according to a statement from the museum.

In other crowd-control efforts, the museum also plans to
implement a new timed ticketing policy later this
month. The decision was
made in advance of the Louvre’s highly anticipated blockbuster
exhibition celebrating the 500th anniversary of Leonardo da Vinci’s
death, which opens on October 24.

The new ticketing policy “allows a better flow of visitors and
is key to a more comfortable visit,” Louvre officials told the
Art Newspaper.
Exactly how the new ticketing system will work, however, remains
unclear. Reservations will need to be made online, but the museum
has not determined whether all visitors will need them, or just the
ones visiting the special exhibition. Within the first 30
hours of the tickets going on sale in June, the public
purchased 33,500 advanced
tickets, straining the website servers.

The Louvre, the world’s most visited museum, hit a record 10.2 million
guests last year. Museum security went on strike in May,
citing the increased admissions and shrinking staff size as the
cause for deteriorating work conditions. Their demands included a
cap on visitor numbers, which currently range from 30,000 to 50,000
people each day. Union members are reportedly considering striking
again.

And these aren’t the only changes underway at the Paris museum.
This week, it is also opening a new conservation and storage center
in Liévin, two hours north of Paris. As Louvre director
Jean-Luc Martinez oversees a rehang of the collection—that’s why
the Mona Lisa gallery was being repainted—he will move
some 250,000 objects from the institution’s holdings to the new
facility by 2023. Currently, reports TAN, the
Louvre storerooms are located in a flood-risk zone.

The post After Her Trip to Another Gallery Sowed Chaos, Mona
Lisa Is Back in Her Home at the Louvre—Only It’s Gotten a Complete
Makeover appeared first on artnet News.