Meeting Mona Lisa “Face To Face”
An EcoChi Vital Abstract
This article was posted October 15, 2019 by Doreen Carvajal, The New York Times.
Mona Lisa’s lingering smile remains the same, but she is getting a first-of-its-kind virtual makeover from the Louvre Museum, which has struggled this year with the popularity of Leonardo da Vinci’s masterpiece and the throngs of selfie-snapping tourists. The VR tour, designed to remedy the problem of crowds and distance, will be housed in a small gallery room near the main Leonardo exhibition and apart from the “Mona Lisa.” The gallery, equipped with 11 headset stations, will offer seven-minute virtual tours. “She is seated, and spectators will be facing her like a conversation, face to face,” said Dominique de Font-Réaulx, the Louvre’s director of mediation and cultural programming. Ms. de Font-Réaulx noted that the two curators of the main exhibition have researched all the historical information for the virtual tour narration, including the visual details of Mona Lisa and her surroundings — from the gentle wave of her hair to her velvet dress to the clay tiles of the loggias of 16th-century Florence. The digital experiment is part of an ongoing effort to broaden the Louvre’s appeal, with France laying new plans to promote its art treasures with virtual reality tours and some lower-tech alternatives. Not everyone is thrilled with this campaign to make virtual reality a more fundamental part of the museum experience. “I would prefer the Louvre to be involved with reality,” said Didier Rykner, a French art critic and founder of the website La Tribune de l’Art, who argues that the state’s money is better spent on art acquisitions and that the museum should concentrate on organizational issues to reduce crowding. “It’s patronizing. It’s disdain,” Mr. Rykner said. “With 3 million euros, you could buy three masterpieces that you could give to the museums in France, so it would be real art for real people,” he said. But earlier this year, the Musée de l’Orangerie in Paris tried out a virtual reality tour inspired by Monet’s Water Lily series that plunged spectators into the artist’s virtual pond in his Giverny garden through animated snowfall and summer days. The reactions of visitors impressed Louvre officials. “Not only young people were using it. There were people over 65, including my father, who is 83,” said Ms. de Font-Réaulx, of the Louvre. “It’s very interesting, and we are open to new displays. But it will not replace the works. The content is first. That’s very important to the Louvre.” HTC Vive Arts, which is donating its services to develop the Louvre’s “Mona Lisa” project, also coordinated the production of the Monet tour along with a VR program last year at the Tate Modern in London, created to accompany an exhibition devoted to Amedeo Modigliani. “What was wonderful was that many people spent more time looking at the Modigliani self-portrait in the last room of the exhibition,” said Nancy Ireson, a curator of the Modigliani exhibition. “They understood what they were going to see. They stayed longer and had conversations about the portrait.”
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