I would be berated mercilessly by my tutors if I failed an art history test, even this many years later…
Nobody is an idiot for wanting to see it, but when I went it was in a small corridor hidden behind a thick glass box. It really could have been a magazine cutout for all that you could actually see of it, and in that sense it was disappointing.
However, there are thousands of art galleries and millions of paintings, that’s the whole point of art; we don’t all have to go and see the same ten paintings, and we shouldn’t feel shamed or worthless if our tastes differ from that.
I wouldn’t mind a maze or labyrinth type thing that teaches you art history as you go through it. I like spending a lot of time in museums and learning new things.
For everyone else, they can go through the back entrance, called “There’s The Fucking Mona Lisa”, at five times the price.
The Da Vinci Madonna Benois is not as iconic a work as the Mona Lisa, but Peter Ustinov could remember it hanging on the wall in the house when he was a child.
AIUI, it’s also free one day a month … although every recommendation I’ve seen (including this one, now) also strongly suggests NOT going on free day due to the maddog crowds.
The best part about how they display the Mona Lisa is that all the tourists flock to that room and leave the rest of the amazing collection alone. The gallery room next-door holds Da Vinci (Virgin on the Rocks), Raphael, and Titian and I was able to spend an hour just basking among them uninterrupted.
This is the time and place to write about an old SF short story I read many years ago (probably in a '60s or '70s Analog magazine). Man finds cave with weird wooden structure in it. Chair at the centre, looking down a wooden tunnel through a ‘window’. Further exploration reveals many radial joists emanating out and a cogs and wheels below what is clearly similar to a merry-go-round. Man cranks the expertly engineered mechanism, which miraculously works, and a picture appears in the ‘window’. It’s the Mona Lisa. But it’s slightly different. And then another. And another. He speeds the mechanism up…
Short story shorter, a set of many Mona Lisas, each slightly different and the conclusion is that Da Vinci the great inventor designed a giant animation machine. The reason for her smile? The one we know and love is at the end of the sequence, after she has just slightly dropped the top of her dress and fleetingly revealed a nipple.
The comic premise of Bob Shaw’s “The Giaconda Caper” (in Cosmic Kaleidoscope , coll 1976 ) is that Leonardo created multiple variant Mona Lisas as part of a zoetrope-like device which anticipates the Cinema with a brief dirty movie.
we were in the middle of an 18 day visit to england when we went to paris. we had asked the concierge at our hotel to let us know if he knew of anything different and inexpensive. before we had left we had set up a behind the chain visit to stonhenge, a public tour of buckingham palace, and a trip to the tate modern but we had some time at different points for anything interesting.
he came up with a few things to do but the prize-winner was an 36 hour paris adventure which included first class seats on the eurostar through the chunnel which came with a free split of moet and chandon white star on the way over, hotel accommodations, lunch on the eiffel tower, a barge tour of the seine, a 4 hour walking tour of paris bakeries and choclatiers (we got free samples of a sourdough baguette baked in the only wood-fired ovens left in paris among other things), and admission to the louvre which came with a 30 minute forced march . . . i mean guided tour . . . well, no forced march through the louvre to let us see the winged victory, venus de milo, vermeer’s the lacemaker, and the mona lisa all in a 30 minute span. don’t get me wrong, the sculptures were grand and the mona lisa experience was . . . unusual, but the vermeer took my breath away.
our concierge must have been connected to someone because we got that package for the equivalent of around $100 each. it was awesome.
If you can pick out the right one, then either they made obvious copies, or you did more than look at them. A truly good forgery is effectively indistinguishable from the real thing without either a tell or a test to prove age of materials.
If the gallery wants to put up copies that are indistinguishable from the real thing, they can find and hire forgers to do some honest work.
Interesting. It hadn’t been reattributed when I saw it, which partly explains why it wasn’t too popular!
No, the Louvre is not disappointing.
And they do have their own building, a very short walk from the Louvre. That’s why I think giving Mona Lisa her own pavilion would work.
The Water Lilies are magical in that setting, incidentally. It’s like a stereoscopic effect: the slight difference in degree of blurring suddenly resolves as if the lilies are really floating on clear water.
Aye, but what a museum! (which bans photography, too).
That’s utterly insane. The train tickets alone are usually more than that.
it’s not awful. The only two things I can think of that might drag it down are the crowds on the busy days, and the sheer size of the place. You can’t really see it in one go, you’ll just exhaust yourself.
I offer this dubious sub-sub-supplement to the article: A couple of years ago at the fitness center, while working my calves, I had the joy of hearing a 20-ish looking guy talking up and trying an incredibly ludicrous line on a young gal. He: “You look… just like the Mona Lisa!” She: “Oouuuu! But she’s ugly!” He (sputtering): “Well… you know…”
