Mona Lisa smile as virtual as it is enigmatic
PARIS— Mona Lisa’s lingering smile remains the same, but she is getting a first-of-its-kind virtual makeover from the Louvre Museum, which has struggled this year with the popularity of Leonardo da Vinci’s masterpiece and the throngs of selfiesnapping tourists.
The Louvre is fine-tuning a virtual reality tour with threedimensional views of the portrait that look beyond the jostling crowds, the shatterproof glass case and the layers of varnish from restorations and the fading green patina.
The real oil on wood “Mona Lisa” was returned last week to the skylit Salle des États to coincide with next Thursday’s opening of an exhibition marking the quincentennial of the death in 1519 of Leonardo, master of the Italian Renaissance. During the summer, while the Salle des États was being renovated, the portrait was moved to the Galerie Médicis, which resulted in severe overcrowding because of limited access. Disappointed tourists complained about fleeting glimpses and barriers that kept them about 4.5 metres from the 75centimetre-tall painting.
The virtual reality tour will be amore intimate encounter. The VR tour, designed to remedy the problem of crowds and distance, will be housed in a small gallery room near the main Leonardo exhibition and apart from the “Mona Lisa.”
The gallery, equipped with 15 headset stations, will offer seven-minute virtual tours that begin in a familiar crush of visitors with mobiles aloft. They lead through a gallery of paintings to the portrait of Mona Lisa, the wife of an Italian silk merchant.
“She is seated, and spectators will be facing her like a conversation, face to face,” said Dominique de Font-Réaulx, the Louvre’s director of mediation and cultural programming.
The digital experiment is part of an ongoing effort to broaden the Louvre’s appeal, with France laying new plans to promote its art treasures with virtual reality tours and some lower-tech alternatives.
Not everyone is thrilled with this campaign to make virtual reality a more fundamental part of the museum experience. “I would prefer the Louvre to be involved with reality,” said Didier Rykner, a French art critic and founder of the website La Tribune de l’Art, who argues that the state’s money is better spent on art acquisitions and that the museum should concentrate on organizational issues to reduce crowding.
But other major museums are experimenting with VR and are pushing forward based on the results. This year, the Musée de l’Orangerie in Paris tried out a virtual reality tour inspired by Monet’s Water Lily series that plunged spectators into the artist’s virtual pond in his Giverny garden through animated snowfall and summer days.