Feted and endlessly scrutinised, Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa has a peculiar status. Paying homage to the painting as a talisman of Renaissance culture and a link to the mind of the man who created it, millions visit the Musée du Louvre in Paris every year and trudge through its galleries to get not very close to the picture and often be very disappointed. The process is akin to an odd and most unsatisfactory secular pilgrimage. 

One of the consequences of this is that the spectacular sixteenth-century paintings hung nearby often receive cursory attention or no respect from exhausted visitors; these include other works by Leonardo and artists such as Raphael and Veronese. Another result is severe congestion around the painting, which adds frustration to what may already seem an underwhelming experience. In view of all these issues, how wise it is for Laurence des Cars, the director of the Louvre, to be considering a new installation of Leonardo’s enigmatic and troublesome portrait. This possibility has been reported recently in Le Figaro and various British newspapers. We only have a sketchy indication at this early stage of what might be offered: an underground gallery with a dedicated entrance. Presumably this would allow one to just see the Leonardo or to combine viewing it with access to the rest of the museum’s collection. A subterranean setting would certainly chime well with the mythologising that built up around the picture in the nineteenth century, when Walter Pater memorably wrote of the Mona Lisa that she ‘is older than the rocks among which she sits; like the vampire, she has been dead many times, and learned the secrets of the grave; and has been a diver in deep seas’. 

The current presentation of the painting was opened in April 2005, following a 4.8 million euro refurbishment of the Salle des États sponsored by Nippon Television, which involved the picture being housed in a climate controlled and bulletproof glass vitrine, which is lit by LEDs and protected by a wooden rail. The gallery has required refurbishment since then, during which the picture was briefly shown in 2019 in the Galerie Médicis, with vast canvases by Rubens providing an intriguing if inappropriate backdrop. The new installation of the Leonardo is, of course, dependent on funding, which may not be immediately forthcoming because of the state of the French economy. However, the timing of the statements about the possibility of a fresh display is astute as more visitors than ever are likely to arrive in Paris this summer because of the Olympic Games and presumably many of them will seek cultural nourishment, so adding to the Louvre’s already significant crowd management challenges and the need to find solutions to them. 

Expectations about access to the picture are so great that it was not even included in the Louvre’s own 2019–20 Leonardo exhibition because the Hall Napoléon, where it was installed, could not accommodate the numbers of visitors who would have wanted to see it. It is fascinating to recall, however, that the Mona Lisa has been loaned within living memory and the modern global cult status of the painting has been fuelled in part by its controversial travels. It was overwhelmed by attention in the winter of 1963 when it was sent to the United States as an exercise in cultural diplomacy, being displayed at both the National Gallery of Art, Washington, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. This followed a visit by President Kennedy to France and was agreed by General de Gaulle, apparently much to the outrage of the Louvre. Ten years later, during the visit of the Japanese prime minister, Kakuei Tanaka, to Paris, Georges Pompidou agreed to a loan of the painting to Tokyo (again in the face of opposition from the museum). At Haneda airport, the Mona Lisa received the type of official welcome normally afforded to a head of state and between the 20th April and the 10th June 1974, 1.5 million visitors saw the world’s most magnetic portrait in the National Museum. Viewers were each allocated ten seconds in front of the painting. 

Irina Antonova, then director of the Pushkin Museum of Art, Moscow, learned that the painting would, when returning to France, be flying over her city. She petitioned Russia’s Minister of Culture to help arrange an exhibition. These efforts were successful and, in an extraordinary episode, considering the wider context of the Cold War, the painting was displayed in the USSR for forty-five days. It was reportedly seen by 300,000 people, some of whom had queued for seven to eight hours. One overexcited admirer threw a bouquet of flowers at the painting, triggering an alarm. 

Alongside such expressions of popular appeal, the Mona Lisa has inspired a vast literature, ranging from the preposterous to the serious. Contributions to this, perhaps inevitably, have appeared in different ways in this Magazine.[1] In 1915 Lionel Cust discussed the picture’s status following its theft from the Louvre and return to public display, which created a sensation and in part prompted debate about the identity of the sitter and claims about other versions of the portrait. In his view ‘the ravishment of the Mona Lisa and subsequent restitution to the Louvre, a squalid story in itself, brought the picture into the domain of the cheap and shallow journalist’. A much fuller, more measured and informative assessment of the painting and its status was offered by Kenneth Clark in 1973. He was invited to inaugurate a series of Burlington Magazine lectures on portraiture and the text of his talk at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, was published in its entirety. He assessed the painting’s style, date, early documentation and shifting critical fortunes, being especially eloquent about how its status has evolved, as early commentaries praised its naturalism, whereas more romantically inclined writers perceived its mysterious and unfathomable qualities – the open-ended nature of which appeal to modern sensibilities. Clark also provided a compelling description of seeing the painting unglazed and away from the gallery – an almost unimaginable privilege in view of the incarceration of the picture we are accustomed to. Taking quite a different approach, grounded in careful documentary research, an important article appeared in this Magazine in 1991 focusing on Salaì, Leonardo’s pupil, and analysing his inheritance, which included a painting that was perhaps a very early copy of the Mona Lisa. More recently, in 2018, exhaustive studies of the life of Lisa Gherardini, the wife of Francesco del Giocondo and the subject of Leonardo’s portrait, have been reviewed. 

The flood of visitors and publications is unlikely to abate; amid all this overwhelming attention the prospect of a new and hopefully more serene, quieter space in which to view the prima donna of old master painting is certainly an attractive prospect. 

[1] L. Cust: ‘Mona Lisa’, THE BURLINGTON MAGAZINE 28 (1915), pp.29–31; K. Clark: ‘Mona Lisa’, THE BURLINGTON MAGAZINE 115 (1973), pp.144–51; J. Shell and G. Sironi: ‘Salaì and Leonardo’s legacy’, THE BURLINGTON MAGAZINE 133 (1991), pp.95–108; and the review by P.C. Marani of ‘Mona Lisa: The People and the Painting’, by M. Kemp and G. Pallanti, in this Magazine 160 (2018), pp.257–58.