April 13, 2005: Few women have 20,000 admirers visit them every day, yet “Mona Lisa” seems positively blasé about it. Ensconced behind 4-centimeter-thick glass, La Joconde, as Leonardo’s iconic painting is known in France, has a high-tech new home in the Louvre’s refurbished Salle des Etats, now renamed the Salle de la Joconde. Redone in tones of beige and lit from above, the room also houses over 50 Venetian Renaissance paintings, including “The Marriage at Cana” by Veronese.

This particular room in the museum was chosen not because the Venetian works have any stylistic relation to Leonardo’s painting but because it was the only one available large enough to accommodate the crowds of visitors (80 percent of the museum’s visitors are thought to pay the price of admission just to see the painting of the lady with the enigmatic smile).

The painting of Mona Lisa looks tiny and a bit silly hanging all alone in the middle of the huge freestanding wall built especially to accommodate it, but La Joconde retains her dignity and just keeps smiling at the hordes of visitors behind barriers snapping photos of her as two security guards try to keep them moving along.

Her temperature-controlled booth has special lighting that is supposed to prevent disturbing reflections on the glass, but museum visitors will still have to dance around a bit to get a good look. The €4.8 million renovation cost was paid for by the Japanese Nippon Television Network, which is also financing the revamping of the gallery housing the Louvre’s other leading crowd-pleaser, the “Venus de Milo.”

Musée du Louvre: Metro Palais Royal. Open 9 a.m.-6 p.m., until 9:45 p.m. on Wednesday and Friday. Closed Tuesday and some public holidays. www.louvre.fr/

Article by Heidi Ellison

© 2005 Paris Update