Mona Lisa smiles in isolation, as the Louvre gets a facelift

Chennai

With the Louvre closed because of the pandemic, museum officials are pushing ahead on a grand restoration and clean-up. From her bulletproof case in the Louvre Museum, Mona Lisa’s smile met an unfamiliar sight the other morning: Emptiness. The gallery where throngs of visitors swarmed to ogle her day after day was a void, deserted under France’s latest coronavirus confinement. Around the corner, the Winged Victory of Samothrace floated quietly above a marble staircase, majestic in the absence of selfie-sticks and tour groups. In the Louvre’s medieval basement, the Great Sphinx of Tanis loomed in the dark like a granite ghost from behind bars.

Yet out of the rare and monumental stillness, sounds of life were stirring in the Louvre’s great halls. The rat-a-tat of a jackhammer echoed from a ceiling above the Sphinx’s head. Rap music thumped from the Bronze Room under Cy Twombly’s ceiling in the Sully Wing, near where workers were sawing parquet for a giant new floor. In Louis XIV’s former apartments, restorers in surgical masks climbed scaffolding to tamp gold leaf onto ornate moldings. The world’s most visited museum — nearly 10 million in 2019, mostly from overseas — is grappling with its longest closure since World War II, as pandemic restrictions keep its treasures under lock and key. But without crowds that can swell to as many as 40,000 people a day, museum officials are seizing a golden opportunity to finesse a grand refurbishment for when visitors return.

“For some projects, the lockdown has allowed us to do in five days what would have previously taken five weeks,” said Sébastien Allard, the general curator and director of the Louvre’s paintings department. Louvre lovers have had to settle for seeing masterpieces during the pandemic through virtual tours and the hashtags #LouvreChezVous and @MuseeLouvre. Millions of viewers got a spectacular fix this month from the Netflix hit series Lupin, in which the actor Omar Sy, playing a gentleman thief, stars in action-filled scenes in the Louvre’s best-known galleries and under I.M. Pei’s glass pyramid. But virtual reality can hardly replace the real thing. Louvre officials are hoping the government will reopen cultural institutions to the public soon, although the date depends on the course the virus takes.

In the meantime, a small army of around 250 artisans has been working since France’s latest lockdown went into effect on Oct. 30. Instead of waiting until Tuesdays — the sole day that the Louvre used to close — curators, restorers, conservators and other experts are pressing ahead five days a week to complete major renovations that had started before the pandemic, and introduce new beautifications that they hope to finish by mid-February.

Some of the work is relatively simple, like dusting the frames of nearly 4,500 paintings. Some is herculean, like makeovers in the Egyptian antiquities hall and the Sully Wing. Nearly 40,000 explanatory plaques in English and French are being hung next to art works.

Even before the pandemic, the Louvre was taking a hard look at crowd management because mass tourism had meant many galleries were choked with tour groups. While travel restrictions have slashed the number of visitors, the museum will limit entry to ticket holders with reservations when it reopens to meet health protocols. Other changes are planned — like yoga sessions every half-hour on Wednesdays near Rubens masterpieces, and workshops in which actors play scenes from famous tableaux right in front of the canvas.

Alderman is a business reporter for NYT©2020

The New York Times