Leonardo da Vinci’s ‘Mona Lisa’ is Moving to a New Home
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Visitors will be able to view the masterpiece without touring the rest of the Louvre, enabling visitor traffic at the museum to increase by up to three million people annually.
French officials are steering the Paris museum into a “new Renaissance,” with an overhaul that may cost as much as $1 billion. It's all about addressing crowd control, security and infrastructure needs at the world’s busiest art museum. It has been announced that Selldorf Architects, a New York-based firm, will team up with Studios Architecture Paris to lead an ambitious renovation and expansion. Catherine Pégard, France’s minister of culture, told the New York Times that the winning design is “respectful and contemporary” and will create “an elegant connection between the city, the palace and the museum.”
The overhaul centers around a redesign of the plaza at the “Grande Colonnade,” the museum’s eastern facade (the other side of the building from the famous glass pyramid), which was built in the 17th century in the classical tradition with giant coupled columns.
Pégard highlighted the winning design’s envisioned symmetry for this facade, which will feature two new underground entrances, expanded exhibition space, dining areas and gift shops. New pathways and greenery connecting the museum with the rest of Paris aim to solve the museum’s growing foot traffic problem by accommodating an estimated three million more visitors per year. The Louvre currently receives about nine million guests a year.
The designers will also be tasked with reimagining the display of the Louvre’s most famous painting, Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa. The work, which alone attracts an average of about 20,000 visitors each day, says Le Monde, will receive a custom-built 33,000 square-foot exhibition space. The new gallery will allow people to view the painting without necessarily visiting the rest of the museum, a change that officials hope will further cut down on crowding.
