The protester, a man disguised as an elderly woman in a wheelchair, was escorted from the Louvre shouting “think of the Earth.”
Mona Lisa has been attacked in a strange protest that saw a man dressed as a woman in a wheelchair throw a cake at the famous painting.
Leonardo da Vinci’s work of art, also known as The Mona Lisa, was vandalized Sunday at the Louvre in Paris.
A man in a “big lady’s suit” jumped out of a wheelchair and tried to break the bulletproof glass that protects the paint, a witness said.
He then smeared the cake on the glass and “threw roses everywhere” before being “tackled” by security and removed from the museum.
The room was full of spectators, who managed to capture amazing clips of cleaners cleaning the paint from the cream.
Fortunately, however, the painting was unharmed in the strange attack.
The identity of the man and the motive for the attack are unknown, but when he was escorted out of the room he shouted “think of the Earth”.
“Some people are destroying the Earth, think about it,” he said in French, according to Twitter users.
“All artists tell you to think about the Earth, all artists think about the Earth, that’s why I did that. Think of the planet. “
This is not the first time the Mona Lisa has been attacked. In 2009, a Russian woman threw a ceramic cup at the portrait, looking frustrated at not having obtained French nationality.
It was the first attack since 1974, when the painting was exhibited at the National Museum in Tokyo and a woman with a disability, so upset by the museum’s inaccessibility, tried to spray red paint on the canvas.
In 1956, the painting was damaged by two attacks: one with acid and the other with a rock, which cut a part of the pigment from the painting. These incidents led the Louvre to place bulletproof glass around the Mona Lisa.
In fact, it was a crime that made her a legend when, in August 1911, she was robbed of the walls of the Louvre by Italian staff Vincenzo Peruggia.
Peruggia was hired by the museum to make protective glass cases for some of his most famous works, including La Gioconda. He hid in a museum closet at night and simply removed the painting from the wall and left the building with the help of a plumber who did not know it.
Almost instantly, Mona Lisa became a household name.
After a two-year search, Peruggia was found, arrested and sentenced to seven months in prison, thought to be a national hero for returning the Mona Lisa to Italian soil, and was restored to the Louvre wall.
Today, painting is the jewel in the crown of the Louvre, attracting millions of visitors each year.
It was created between 1503 and 1519 by the Italian Renaissance master Leonardo da Vinci and has become the most famous and replicated painting in the world, immortalized in everything from fashion to pop art to novels. and movies, such as The Da Vinci Code i Smile Mona Lisa.