The Mona Lisa is loved and admired as the most famous painting in the world, but it had a harrowing brush with disaster when a 36-year-old man disguised as a wheelchair-bound elderly woman infiltrated the Louvre museum in Paris and attempted to smash a cake onto the priceless artwork. Fortunately, the Mona Lisa is protected by bulletproof glass that absorbed the impact and the cake residue. The man was apparently a left-wing climate change fanatic and serious charges are likely.
Mona Lisa attacked with cake
Unsurprisingly the aspiring vandal’s mental health is being investigated, but the motive appears to have been primarily political in nature.
The disguise was evidently intended to allow him to get especially close to the painting, which is invariably surrounded by a large crowd and security guards.
The Mona Lisa has a special viewing area set aside for the disabled, hence the wheelchair. What’s less clear is the purpose of dressing up as an elderly lady.
The man surely would have been able to access the wheelchair spot without the assistance of the wig and makeup he was wearing.
That part of the costume may have been meant to enable him to hide the cake. To be fair, sneaking that unorthodox weapon into the world’s most visited museum without arousing any suspicion must have been quite a feat.
After assaulting the painting, the man was taken away by security guards while screaming semi-coherently about “people who are destroying the Earth.”
Charges likely
Destroying the Mona Lisa would have been a bizarre strategy for raising awareness of his cause, but the fact that only the glass was smeared with the cake isn’t likely to make art lovers any more sympathetic to his scheme.
The masterpiece by legendary Renaissance man Leonardo da Vinci is, for reasons that have never been entirely clear, the most famous and recognizable painting in the world and its value is incalculable.
T.S. Eliot famously described Shakespeare’s Hamlet as the “Mona Lisa of literature,” meaning that both are almost universally recognized as the pinnacle of artistic expression but no one can really explain why that should be the case.
That opinion hasn’t stopped the enormous crowds that line up to get a look at the Mona Lisa every day, and fortunately the unhinged cake stunt will not be stopping them either.
Most of the other great masterpieces in the Louvre are not nearly as well protected, so the cake attack could have done real damage if it had been aimed at a different target.
The man is likely to face charges for damaging cultural artifacts, and it is fair to say at this point that his stunt does not seem to have made any progress towards his stated goal of saving the world.
