The Mona Lisa is getting her own room.
French President Emmanuel Macron announced significant upgrades to Paris’s Louvre Museum Tuesday in hopes to alleviate crowding and improve visitor experiences at one of France’s top tourism attractions. Among the changes: a dedicated exhibition room for the Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa, which an estimated 80% of the museum’s roughly 9 million annual visitors come to see.
Macron’s announcement comes on the heels of a memo from the director of the Louvre to France’s culture minister. In the memo, the director, Laurence des Cars, the first woman to lead a French landmark, complains of the building’s dilapidated state. In a translation described by France 24, she warns about a “proliferation of damage in museum spaces, some of which are in very poor condition,” she goes on to note that the leaky roof and inability to regulate temperatures endangers the preservation of some of the museum’s most consequential artworks.
Since taking over the museum in 2021, des Cars has advocated for many upgrades to the museum, which welcomes nearly nine million visitors each year, and the planned upgrades announced by Macron also include adding a new entrance to alleviate crowding at the famed I.M. Pei glass pyramid, which des Cars described as structurally outdated–“cold in the winter, hot in the summer, and always noisy.” The memo also described too few restrooms and dining facilities and poor signage that exacerbates overcrowding,
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Macron also announced that in addition to a dedicated exhibition space, the Mona Lisa—known as la Joconde in France and la Gioconda in the original Italian—would be accessible separately from the rest of the museum, with its own admission ticket. While the Louvre houses hundreds of artworks, the Mona Lisa, Venus de Milo, and a handful of other works are the source of much of the museum’s crowding, while other, lesser-known works are rarely visited at all.
The sprawling Louvre palace was established as a museum owned by the French state during the French Revolution. The home of the French monarch from the 12th century until 1682, when Louis XIV decamped to his new palace at Versailles, the building has undergone renovations throughout its tenure as a museum, most recently in the 1980s when the glass pyramid was added in addition to renovations and upgrades, including significant underground spaces designed to increase the museum’s annual visitor capacity.
The Louvre has an annual budget of nearly $300 million, around 60% of which is from its ticket sales revenues and licensing agreements. The rest is funded by the French state, giving France’s presidents a chance to tie any improvements to their own legacies. The previous upgrades were a signature achievement of President François Mitterand’s term.
Sud-Solidaires, a labor union representing some workers at the Louvre, quickly shared a statement complaining that the planned changes would do nothing to alleviate the bulk of the complaints in des Cars’s memo.
To help pay for the upgrades, which aim to accommodate up to 12 million visitors per year, Macron also announced that visitors from outside the European Union will pay increased admission fees starting in 2026. General admission is currently €22 for all visitors over 18, or over 26 for residents of the European Economic Area (EU, Norway, Iceland, and Liechtenstein). Admission is free after 6 PM the first Friday of each month from September through June.
The Louvre is the world’s largest and most-visited museum, housing more than 500,000 objects, of which 38,000 are on display at any given moment. Entrance is currently capped at 30,000 visitors per day, and visitors can pre-book entry slots when they purchase their tickets. The museum welcomes visitors every day of the week except Tuesday.
