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Mona Lisa is displayed in the empty Salle des Etats of the Louvre Museum in Paris. Photo by MARTIN BUREAU/AFP via Getty Images.
As France weathers its second lockdown, cultural institutions across Paris have shut down and the streets are quiet. But behind closed doors, the Louvre, the world’s most visited museum, is a hive of activity.
While visitors can’t enter the storied museum which welcomed more than nine million people in 2019 restoration specialists, curators, and other experts are hard at work, seizing the calm provided by the shutdown to execute refurbishments ranging from the dusting of 4,500 paintings to the meticulous cleanup of stone-etched hieroglyphs.
Mona Lisa is alone but still smiling
27 Jan, 2021 02:03 AM
7 minutes to read
The Mona Lisa is alone. Photo / Dmitry Kostyukov, The New York Times
New York Times
By: Liz Alderman
With the Louvre closed because of the pandemic, museum officials are pushing ahead on a grand restoration and cleanup. 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.
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Mona Lisa s smile isn t greeting visitors at the Louvre; a small army of artisans working overtime to complete restoration before reopening
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Mona Lisa s smile isn t greeting visitors at the Louvre; a small army of artisans working overtime to complete restoration before reopeningBy
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Synopsis
New York Times
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.