A 36-year-old man has been arrested and admitted to psychiatric care after smearing Mona Lisa with a cake in an alleged protest against artists who do not focus enough on “the planet”.
Key points:
- The man entered the Louvre in a wheelchair, wearing lipstick and a wig
- The protective glass meant that the Mona Lisa was not damaged
- The famous Da Vinci painting has been attacked many times over the years
The most famous portrait in the world had his cake and it was also eaten after a man disguised as an old woman tried to break the protective glass of the painting before smearing the surface with Sunday dessert.
Images captured inside the Louvre Museum in Paris show the man, wearing a wig and lipstick, jumping from a wheelchair before his act of vandalism.
A Twitter user identified as Lukeee posted a video showing a museum employee cleaning up what he says is glass cake and another in which a man dressed in white is escorted by security guards.
“A man dressed as a tall lady jumps out of a wheelchair and tries to break the bulletproof glass of the Mona Lisa. He then proceeds to spread the cake on the glass and throws roses everywhere, all before being approached by security.” , Lukeee wrote.
“There are people who are destroying the Earth …”, the man says in another video, speaking French and indicating that the incident had an environmental reason.
“All artists, think of the Earth. That’s why I did this. Think of the planet,” he said.
Loading
Leonardo da Vinci’s prized work, which has been the subject of vandalism in the past, was unharmed thanks to its bulletproof glass case.
An investigation has been opened into “an attempt to vandalize a cultural work,” the Paris prosecutor’s office said.
The Mona Lisa has been behind glass since a Bolivian man threw a stone at the painting in December 1956, damaging his left elbow. In 2005 it was placed in a reinforced box that also controls the temperature and humidity.
In 2009, a Russian woman threw an empty cup of tea into the paint, which lightly scratched the box.
The Louvre is the largest museum in the world, with hundreds of thousands of works and attracted 10 million visitors a year before the COVID-19 pandemic.
AFP