Mona Lisa to get dedicated room at Louvre: President Macron

PARIS: France will launch a six-year renovation of the Louvre in Paris, enlarging the world’s most-visited museum to make room for the huge crowds who now cram inside the palace on the banks of the Seine, President Emmanuel Macron said on Tuesday.

A new entrance will make it easier to get in and out, and a dedicated space with a separate entrance will house the art museum’s prize attraction, Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa, Macron said during a visit to the museum.

Under the new plans, the Mona Lisa – which attracts around 20,000 visitors a day – would be “independently accessible” from the rest of the museum, with a separate ticket to see it, Macron said.

The museum in central Paris would also have a “new grand entrance” on its eastern facade to help ease congestion at its current glass-and-metal pyramid entry point.

Starting next year, the museum will also charge a higher entry fee for visitors from outside the European Union, he said.

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Louvre President Laurence des Cars warned last week that the centuries-old building - once a lavish palace for French kings - was in a dire state, with leaks and temperature swings that could endanger the conservation of works of art.

A visit has become “a physical ordeal”, with artwork hard to find in a confusing layout and too little space for visitors to take a break, eat or use the toilet, des Cars said.

The Louvre now receives 9 million visitors a year, more than double the 4 million it was designed to handle when it was modernised in the 1980s. The renovation will increase capacity to 12 million, Macron said.

He did not say how much the renovation would cost but said it would be financed through the Louvre’s own funds, ticket sales, sponsorships and earnings from its sister museum in Abu Dhabi, and thus “will not weigh on the taxpayer”.

Big civic projects in the capital have traditionally been a way for French presidents to burnish their legacies. Last month, Macron reopened Notre-Dame cathedral, meticulously restored five years after it was damaged by fire.

Macron said France would over the next few months launch an “international architecture competition” and select winners by the end of the year to transform the Louvre’s buildings by 2031 at the latest.

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“While Notre Dame was the architectural catalyst of our craftsmanship, this project for the Louvre must be for art, art history and its transmission a new step in the life of the nation,” Macron said.

The seat of French kings until Louis XIV abandoned it for Versailles in the late 1600s, the Louvre is regularly listed as the world’s most visited museum.

Beyond the Mona Lisa, it houses masterpieces like Greek marble sculpture the “Venus de Milo” and Eugene Delacroix’s painting “Liberty Leading the People”.