Giving "Mona Lisa" private space is a terrible idea

When you think of a room of one’s own, you’re liable to think of Virginia Woolf’s celebrated essay that said, "A woman must have money and room of her own if she is to write fiction."

While my post today is about a room of one’s own, it’s not fiction. This week, the Louvre moved "Mona Lisa" to a separate gallery that visitors can access without ever entering the main museum.

How dumb is that? What about the rest of the collection, the 500,000 other works - some of which are the most celebrated in Western art?

Why is the Louvre steering visitors away the rest of its holdings for Mona's portrait? Call it Mona mania - a longstanding art world sickness.

I’m thinking of stories that regularly pop up in the news from art experts - one sillier than the other. This includes all speculations about the identity of the sitter for the portrait - from a likeness of the artist to his mother and to his servant.

That latter conjecture came from someone who should know better, the head of the Italian National Historic Properties Evaluation Commission - Silvano Vincenti.

Odd that someone having to do with history would overlook accounts written in 1550 by Giorgio Vasari who identified the subject as Lisa Gherardini, wife of the Florentine silk merchant Francesco del Giocondo.

Then there’s the silliness about the state of Mona’s health. Art critic Jonathan Jones at the Guardian thinks she was sick with syphilis. Why?

Jones cites a record in a Florentine convent apothecary indicating that Mona bought snail water, which was known in her day to combat sexually transmitted diseases. This assumes she bought the potion for herself.

But none of that matters because the record of her buying snail water occurred more than 10 years after she sat for the portrait. If she had syphilis when she posed, she would have died before the time of the purchase.

But here’s the thing. The portrait’s celebrity is a 20th-century phenomenon. It hung in the?Louvre?for 107 years – since 1804 – without notice, until it was stolen in 1911.

And get this. The reason it was taken was because it was small enough to hide under the?thieves’ coat. Mona had such a low profile that no one on the museum staff noticed it missing for a full 26 hours.

And because it took more than two years to recover the painting and because media coverage of the search was ongoing, interest ratcheted up. Newspapers worldwide headlined the search. Wanted posters pasted on walls throughout Paris added to the portrait’s renown. Even a song was written about it crooned by Nat King Cole.

Then there was the hoopla that came with the recovery of the painting. That’s when people began mobbing the museum to see the painting. Reportedly, in the first two days after it was rehung, Mona had more than 100,000 visitors. Now it’s millions.

But I ask you, is Mona’s smart-ass little grin that never reaches her eyes, that starts at the edge of her mouth, flickers, and then dies, as if she decided to un-smile worth a room of her own?

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