The Louvre Museum in Paris will move the Mona Lisa to a newly created exhibition space, President Emmanuel Macron of France announced on Tuesday as he unveiled sweeping plans to expand and renovate the world’s biggest and most visited museum.
Speaking in front of Leonardo da Vinci’s 16-century masterpiece itself, Mr. Macron also said that the Louvre would create a new entrance in its easternmost facade, near the Seine River, to alleviate overcrowding at the museum, which is swarmed by nearly nine million visitors every year.
The vast renovation, which will also include overhauling aging infrastructure around the museum, would be paid for partly by increasing ticket prices for visitors from non-European Union countries, starting in 2026, Mr. Macron said.
The goal is to welcome far more visitors than today — Mr. Macron set a target of 12 million visitors per year — in much better conditions, the French president said.
The culture ministry will organize an international architectural competition this year, and the new entrance is expected to be finished by 2031 at the latest, he added.
“The Louvre will be redesigned and restored to become the epicenter of art history for our country and beyond,” he said in a carefully choreographed speech, as the Mona Lisa’s famous gaze peered from behind him.
Already, the museum has capped daily attendance at 30,000 people, who mostly enter via the Louvre Pyramid, a glass-and-steel structure designed by the architect I.M. Pei in the 1980s, during the museum’s last major overhaul. The entrance was intended to welcome half the visitors it currently does.
An estimated 80 percent of those crowds come for the Mona Lisa — a magnet for droves of selfie-snapping tourists that has become a crowd-control headache.
Mr. Macron said that the dedicated room for the Mona Lisa would be one of several new exhibition spaces created underneath the Cour Carrée, the Louvre’s easternmost courtyard, and connected to the existing museum. The Mona Lisa would be accessible separately from the rest of the museum, he added, with its own ticket.
The massive renovations announced by Mr. Macron come at a delicate time for France, which has been mired in political turmoil and is currently facing intense belt-tightening in public finances. The new entrance would be paid for by the museum’s own funds, Mr. Macron said, although he did not provide a detailed breakdown of the overall renovation costs.
The Louvre — a former palace that was home to French kings until 1682 — is much more than a tourist attraction. It is a symbol of France’s cultural clout, and an important soft-power instrument for the French State.
For Mr. Macron, who is weakened domestically, putting his imprint on the Louvre is a way to burnish his legacy, experts say — similar to his five-year bet on restoring the fire-ravaged Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris, which ultimately paid off.
“He started his presidency at the Louvre, and he wants to end it at the Louvre,” Julien Lacaze, the president of Sites et Monuments, said of Mr. Macron, who delivered his first term victory speech in front of the glass and steel pyramid in 2017.
The iconic pyramid is a footprint left by one of Mr. Macron’s predecessors as president, François Mitterrand, who commissioned the structure in the 1980s.
“He is working on the image that will remain in history books,” added Mr. Lacaze, whose association campaigns for the protection of France’s architectural and natural heritage.
Mr. Macron’s announcement came less than a week after the daily newspaper Le Parisien reported that Laurence des Cars, the Louvre’s president, had warned in a confidential memo to the French culture ministry that the museum was in desperate need of a revamp because of significant wear and tear.
Problems outlined in the memo included water leaks, temperature variations that endangered artworks, insufficient restrooms and food facilities, and poor signage. The memo also warned that the glass pyramid was structurally outdated — overheated during the summer, and too noisy year-round.
“Everywhere the building is suffering,” Ms. des Cars said on Tuesday before Mr. Macron’s speech in the Louvre’s Salle des États gallery, where the Mona Lisa is currently kept.
“Each day this very room is the scene of intense agitation,” she said, a place where frustrated and tired tourists jostle to catch a glimpse the painting.
“The Louvre’s exceptional visitor numbers are not a curse, they’re a source of pride,” she added. “It’s also a challenge to reinvent ourselves and remain faithful to our public service mission.”
Some critics said that Mr. Macron — diminished politically and unable to run for a third term in 2027 — had latched onto the Louvre in hopes of preserving his legacy.
Labor unions representing some of the museum’s 2,300 employees acknowledged that the building needed to be renovated but said creating a whole new entrance was not the right fix.
Sud-Solidaires, one of the labor unions, said in a statement last week that a “mammoth project” like a new entrance would “bring absolutely no solution to the problems” but would “undoubtedly allow Emmanuel Macron to adopt the role of savior that he is so fond of.”
Mr. Macron’s office insists that getting personally involved in the Louvre’s renovation is part of his job description, not a ploy to score political points.
“His role is to protect everything that is part of the country’s heritage, pride and influence,” said a presidential official on Monday, who in keeping with French practice was not authorized to speak publicly ahead of Mr. Macron’s speech.
The museum has an annual budget of nearly $300 million, most of which comes from its own resources like ticket sales and brand licensing, with about a third funded by the French state.
Roughly a quarter of the Louvre’s visitors are French, while rest come from around the world — mainly the United States, China and other European countries like Britain, Italy, Germany and Spain.
Mr. Lacaze, the heritage expert, said that the museum was hardly falling apart, but needed to better manage the flow of visitors, who elbow past each other to see the Mona Lisa or the Venus de Milo and often leave rooms full of other masterpieces near empty.
“It’s the biggest museum in the world, but tourists only come to see five works of art,” he said, adding that the museum should do more to promote its vast collection — nearly 500,000 pieces, of which only about 30,000 are on display — in order to peel visitors away from the buzziest attractions.
Mr. Macron partly addressed those concerns on Tuesday, saying that the newly-renovated museum would emphasize art education, with the goal of doubling the number of student visitors to 900,000 per year.
Still, Mr. Lacaze argued, better to “make the most” of what the Louvre already has “before embarking on gargantuan spending.”