PARIS — French President Emmanuel Macron announced Tuesday that the Leonardo da Vinci masterpiece the Mona Lisa will get its own dedicated room inside the Louvre as the museum will be renovated and expanded in a major overhaul that will take years.
The renovation will include a new entrance near the River Seine, to be opened by 2031, and the creation of underground rooms, Macron said in a speech from the Louvre room where the Mona Lisa is displayed.
Macron did not disclose the cost, which is expected to run into the hundreds of millions of euros, to modernize the most visited museum in the world, which is plagued with overcrowding and outdated facilities.
The Louvre’s most recent overhaul was in the 1980s, when the museum’s now-iconic glass pyramid was unveiled. But the museum is no longer consider up to international standards.
Louvre director Laurence des Cars had sent a note earlier this month to Rachida Dati, France’s culture minister, saying the museum is threatened by “obsolescence.” She warned that the building is gradually degrading due to water leaks, temperature variations and other issues “endangering the preservation of artworks.”
The pyramid that serves at the museum’s entrance, unveiled in 1989 as part of late President François Mitterrand’s project, now appears outdated. The place isn’t properly insulated from the cold and the heat and tends to amplify noise, making the space uncomfortable for the public and the staff, des Cars wrote.
She also said the museum has a lack of food offerings and restroom facilities.
Questions had arisen about how the Mona Lisa should be displayed in the museum.
Des Cars asked for the issue to be “reassessed,” suggesting a transfer of the museum’s most popular attraction to another room that would be dedicated to it. That’s what Macron said will happen.
The Mona Lisa is now being shown behind protective glass in the museum’s largest room, overcrowded with long, noisy lines of visitors eager to take a selfie with the da Vinci masterpiece. That makes some other paintings in the room by the greatest Venetian painters, like Titian and Veronese, go unnoticed by many.
The museum’s latest big renovation in the 1980s was designed to accommodate four million visitors a year. But 8.7 million people visited the museum last year, more than three-quarters of them foreigners, mostly from the United States, China, Italy, the United Kingdom, Germany and Spain.
The financing needed for such a major renovation hasn’t been spelled, but any renovation at the former royal palace is expected to be costly and technically complicated.
The Pompidou Center, another major museum in Paris, is set to close to undergo a five-year renovation costing about 262 million euros — about $273 million — starting at the end of the year.
Half of the Louvre’s budget is financed by the French state, including the wages of its 2,200 employees.
The other half is provided by private funds, including ticket sales, earnings from restaurants, shops and bookings for special events as well as patrons and other partners. That includes the United Arab Emirates’ financing for the right to use the Louvre brand for the Louvre Abu Dhabi museum.