Big changes are coming to the Louvre museum in Paris.
Chief among them: The Mona Lisa will get her own room. Leonardo da Vinci’s famed Italian Renaissance painting, known as La Joconde among the French and the sort of people who insist on spelling Halloween with an apostrophe, currently hangs in the Louvre’s largest room, the Salle des États. Though da Vinci’s masterpiece occupies its own wall, several other works, such as Veronese’s gigantic The Wedding Feast at Cana, can be found in the same room.
This week, though, French President Emmanuel Macron announced that the Mona Lisa will be “installed in a special space, accessible independently of the museum,” as part of an extensive renovation of the iconic institution.
The announcement comes amid the fallout of a private memo the Louvre’s director sent to France’s culture minister last week. The memo, which was leaked to the press, described the museum as dilapidated and in need of repairs, with leaky ceilings, chronic overcrowding, and other dire concerns that could endanger the facility’s priceless collection.
Louvre Renovation: What's Changing?
To help address some of those concerns, the renovations outlined by Macron include adding a new entrance along the Colonnade de Perrault on the Louvre’s eastern facade to relieve some of the crowding at the Pyramid entrance. I.M. Pei’s glass-and-steel structure was designed to accommodate about 4 million annual visitors. Last year, more than 8 million people filed through.
A lot of those folks make a beeline for the lady with the mystic smile, creating a big, noisy, selfie-snapping huddle of humanity all jostling to experience one of those tourism musts that everybody does and nobody really enjoys.
By moving the Mona Lisa into its own dedicated space, to be constructed in the Cour Carrée (one of the Louvre’s main courtyards), the idea is to improve crowd flow in the rest of the museum. In fact, Macron says that visitors will eventually be able to purchase a separate ticket for those who only want to see the Mona Lisa.
New underground rooms will also be built, according to the plan, and existing structures will undergo overdue repairs.
The total cost of the project will be hundreds of millions of euros. Per Macron, the makeover will be financed, in part, by a higher entry fee charged to visitors from outside the European Union starting in January 2026.
The new price for those visitors, which would include tourists from the United States, hasn’t been announced. Currently, general admission is €22 (about $23).
“Another way of financing the project,” Macron added, “is to increase the number of visitors to 12 million a year.”
That would amount to increasing visitation by about a third.
The problem is too many people so you’re gonna let in a bunch more people? Mon Dieu!
