Big World, Small Town
Like almost everyone else who walked through the glass pyramid entrance of the Louvre that day, our family had one major goal.
It was the second of our three days in Paris, and we’d designated that day, Louvre Day. I’d already admired the famed museum from the outside, as our hotel was just across the street from the Tuileries Gardens, the front lawn of the Louvre. I’d run the gravel paths of the gardens each day we were in Paris but that day I remember being excited to finally go inside its walls.
The Louvre is the world’s largest art museum. At over 782,000 square feet, the museum is absolutely massive. The Louvre has three separate wings, and you could easily spend weeks exploring the treasures it holds from all eras of human history. But we only had one day to see as much as we could.
I’m not sure which one of us decided that we should see the Mona Lisa first, but as soon as we were inside the building and holding a map in our hands, we set out to find her.
According to the map, the Mona Lisa was deep inside the Denon Wing. We’d reserved our tickets so that we were the first group inside at 9 a.m., so we beelined it to the entrance to the Denon Wing and started what would be an interesting and complicated journey to the Mona Lisa.
The Mona Lisa has an interesting and complicated history of her own. The now 500-year-old painting by Leonardo DaVinci was never actually completed by the polymath genius. Found in his studio when he died in 1519, art scholars believe that DaVinci started work on the piece in 1503 while he was living in Italy and took her along with him when he moved to France in 1516 to work for the French king. DaVinci worked on the Mona Lisa off and on for many years, but partial paralysis and age likely kept him from ever completing it.
After DaVinci’s death, the French king he’d been working for, Francis I, added the Mona Lisa to his royal art collection where is stayed for many years. When the monarchy was overthrown during the French Revolution of 1789, the Mona Lisa was returned to the people and put on public display. While it had none of the fame it has today, the Mona Lisa did have many admirers. One of them was Napoleon, who liked the work so much he kept the painting in his bedroom for a time.
The Mona Lisa didn’t gain the worldwide fame she has today until 1911 when the painting was stolen off the wall where it hung in the Louvre. The news of the theft spread around the world. Just like today, people love a good crime story and the theft made the Mona Lisa famous. Tourists started to visit the Louvre just to see the place where the now famous painting used to hang.
The French police undertook a massive investigation to find the masterpiece, questioning anyone who had access. Those who were questioned included the artist Pablo Picasso. Picasso had been suggested as a possible suspect by a fellow artist and was questioned by the French police, who eventually cleared him of any wrongdoing.
The Mona Lisa remained lost for two years, until an art dealer in Italy notified local authorities that a man had tried to sell the work to him. That man, Vincenzo Peruggia, had worked in Paris at the Louvre fitting glass over paintings. One night, he stole the Mona Lisa after the museum had closed. He eventually took it back to DaVinci’s home country of Italy, where he thought it rightfully belonged.
When the painting was recovered and returned to the Louvre, it became a major attraction. Everyone wanted to see the great stolen masterpiece, finally returned home after such a long and perilous journey.
Our search for the Mona Lisa turned out to be equally long and perilous. As we trekked through corridor after corridor of the Denon Wing, it seemed like we would never reach our destination. What became the Louvre Museum was built over many years and many phases so there never seemed to be a direct path to anything. Often, we would come to the end of a corridor expecting to find a door but only find a wall.
When we finally reached what should have been the entrance to the room that held the great masterpiece, we were met with a locked door. Other tourists told us that entrance to the room was not allowed from that door and that we had to take a different path. So, we set off following them up and down marble staircases and across room after room, some brimming with art and others totally empty, until we reached the room on the other side of that locked door.
But the Mona Lisa wasn’t there. We learned that she’d been moved to the Richelieu Wing a few months earlier in an attempt to place the painting somewhere that could better handle the huge masses of people yearning to see her.
So off we went, back the way we came. There was no way to get to the Richalieu Wing from the Denon, so we had to go back to the main entrance under the pyramid, exit Denon and then enter Richalieu.
Of course, the line to get into the Richalieu Wing was massive because that was where the Mona Lisa was.
Since it’s theft, the world’s most famous painting has come to play a central role in popular culture. As one of the most recognized images in existence, the Mona Lisa has been endlessly studied, explored and written about over the past 100 years. The founder of psychotherapy, Sigmund Freud, wrote about the painting, theorizing the woman in the work represents DaVinci’s mother, and the painting is a fantasy of being reunited with her. When Beyoncé and Jay-Z were looking for a symbol of artistic greatness and cultural dominance for a music video, they chose to be filmed in the Louvre directly in front of the Mona Lisa.
It took a long time, but after riding up what seemed like seven or eight escalators, we reached the massive room that serves as the current home of the painting we’d come to see.
Docents instructed the crowd to queue up in a long line that snaked down the massive room where the masterpiece sat at the very front. Massive paintings on the walls dwarfed the small Mona Lisa sitting humbly inside a bullet-proof case.
We only had a few moments with her. Docents kept moving the line along with firm commands to “move along, move along.” Like everyone else, I took as many photos as I could in those few minutes, but soon I felt like I should leave and give someone else a chance to see the painting up close.
While the Mona Lisa has come to symbolize many things for many people, no one will ever really know what the painting meant to DaVinci. And while it became his most famous work, he had never really even finished it.
One of my favorite quotes is from the theologian Karl Rahner. “In the torment of the insufficiency of everything attainable,” Rahner wrote, “we eventually learn that here, in this life, all symphonies remain unfinished.” Maybe it’s fitting that the most famous work of art ever created never really reached completion. As DaVinci himself said, “art is never finished, only abandoned.”
Charles D. Thomas is a writer and psychotherapist who made Three Rivers his home for over a decade. Feedback is welcome at [email protected].
Any views or opinions expressed in “Big World, Small Town” are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of the Watershed Voice staff or its board of directors.
