Officials at the world’s most visited museum believe the iconic Louvre in Paris, home to Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa, is in need of serious repairs, CBS News reports.
“We have problems with the building,” Louvre Museum director Laurence des Cars acknowledged in an interview with CBS News. She said the problems are partly due to age, as the palace that houses the museum was built in the early 13th century.
Des Cars also said:
“It’s nine centuries of history, at the heart of Paris and at the heart of the history of France.”
But it’s also a question of maintenance. The museum’s last major renovation was more than three decades ago, when renowned architect I.M. Pei built the now-legendary glass pyramid that serves as the main entrance.
However, when this entrance was opened in 1989, the architects were counting on 4 million visitors a year. Last year, 9 million people visited the Louvre, and officials hope to increase the annual flow of visitors to 12 million in the coming years.
To accommodate that increase, French President Emmanuel Macron last month announced an ambitious ten-year plan to renovate and expand the museum. The plans include creating a new entrance on the east side of the building to help manage the flow of visitors.
It will become the main entrance, as the pyramid is simply too small to handle the current number of visitors, let alone the anticipated increase. The entrance area is small, the space underneath is limited, and it gets very hot under the glass in the summer. However, the Louvre pyramid will still serve as an access point for visitors.
The new entrance will open into the museum’s eastern courtyard, the Cour Carrée, and there are plans to extend it downwards by building new galleries underneath. One of these galleries is for the Louvre’s most famous exhibit, the Mona Lisa.
If you ask people queuing at the entrance to the museum what they most want to see, most will say, “Mona Lisa.”
Carlos from San Diego didn’t even hesitate: “I always wanted to see it, ever since I was little,” he told CBS News. “I’m a big fan and this is one of the things that I look forward to.”
“You can never get enough of it,” said Ella, visiting from Canada, who had already been to the Louvre on several previous visits to Paris.
But once you get into the room where the Mona Lisa currently resides, its worldwide appeal has crowds jostling to catch a glimpse of her enigmatic face. The relatively small size of the painting often shocks visitors, and some are forced to use the zoom function on their smartphone cameras to get a closer look.
Da Vinci’s masterpiece is in the Salle des Statutes, the largest room in the Louvre. It is also home to major works by Venetian masters Titian, Tintoretto and Veronese, which are often overlooked. Veronese’s remarkable work The Wedding Feast at Cana occupies the back wall opposite the Mona Lisa. But visitors often walk past her without even noticing.
“She’s a sort of universal masterpiece,” des Cars says. “People want to spend time with her, and that’s okay. And we need to organise that. But the Louvre is filled with 1,000 Mona Lisas.”
She says one of the goals of the renovation is to improve the flow of visitors so that people can more easily find the collections they most want to see, “and also discover the wonders of the Louvre.”
Des Cars believes the new main entrance will also link the museum more concretely to the surrounding city. “The Pyramid is a beautiful, wonderful piece of architecture,” she says. “But it’s a bit isolated in Paris, with no direct contact with the city. The east entrance will allow us to have direct contact with the city, and we think it’s the perfect balance for this extraordinary building.”
The ambitious renovation will take a total of 10 years: Six years will be spent on the expansion, and another four on renovating the building and updating outdated technical systems. In addition, the security system will be updated to cater for the museum’s ever-increasing number of visitors.
The project is expected to cost around $800 million. Macron has promised that French taxpayers will not have to foot the bill, although public funds will cover $10 million for initial surveys and plans.
To pay for all the work, ticket prices will change and from next year visitors from outside the European Union will have to pay more. French and European taxes help fund public cultural institutions, so the argument is that they already pay on top of the entrance fee, unlike visitors from further afield.
“It’s not to discourage international tourism or to punish anyone, but it’s the reality of the economy,” des Cars says.
The Louvre has also begun fundraising, hoping that the museum’s prominence will open wallets around the world so it can continue to hold its top spot while adapting to modernity.
