别围在微笑的《蒙娜丽莎》面前
Job One at the Louvre: Don't Stand in Front Of Smiling Woman
PARIS -- On Monday, April 4, for the first time in three decades, visitors to the Louvre Museum here won't see the Mona Lisa .
Leonardo da Vinci's masterpiece last left the building on a trip to Japan in 1974 and, with her freshly renovated room about to reopen, may never leave again. The vast majority of tourists in Paris visit the Louvre, and more than 90% of them make a bee-line for the smiling visage of Lisa Gherardini. The Louvre giftshop sells more than 330,000 Mona Lisa items annually, including 200,000 postcards, 20,000 magnets and 10,000 puzzles.
The Louvre fears irate crowds if Japanese and American visitors turn up to find an apology hanging from Lisa's empty spot on the wall. While Rembrandts, Titians and El Grecos can all spend weeks in restoration, under study or on tour, the Mona Lisa has always remained on display.
Mona Lisa
That makes life complicated for her curator of two decades, Cécile Scailliérez. The 47-year-old art historian can spend quality time with the painting only on Tuesdays, when the Louvre closes, or at odd hours. Mona Lisa's first X-ray in three decades was performed at night.
The painting's cult-like popularity presents singular problems for other Louvre staff. Museum guides moan of tourists' monomania for the painting. Guards complain of the constant noise, flashbulbs and pickpockets in her room. The seasoned expert who X-rayed her in November was so nervous he started fretting irrationally that a light bulb might fall from the ceiling and damage the work. The image requires special security after a theft and two attacks.
Now she is having her room renovated, to handle an average of more than 1,500 visitors an hour. She'll be off display on April 4 while curators install her in the upgraded digs. In the meantime, she has taken over another hall full of paintings.
In short, Mona Lisa has become like so many pop icons: a prima donna who puts outrageous demands on her handlers.
"It's a nuisance," says Ms. Scailliérez, the curator. "She sets her own laws" for how to organize the museum.
During Ms. Scailliérez's 20-year tenure, the idolatry has ballooned. Today Mona Lisa receives at least one fan letter a week, much of it "bizarre," the curator says. Ms. Scailliérez tries to respond to each, including a recent hand-written missive from a numerologist who claimed to have stumbled on an "INCREDIBLE" relationship between the painting's dimensions and da Vinci's birth date.
"Everybody has a discovery," Ms. Scailliérez says.
Standing in front of the painting on a recent Tuesday, Ms. Scailliérez says she takes advantage of the weekly quiet to admire Mona Lisa in peace. Despite being inconvenienced by her subject, Ms. Scailliérez says "you don't count the hours" spent with Mona Lisa .
A lover of 16th-century European art who refers familiarly to the Italian painter as "Léonard," his name in French, Ms. Scailliérez studied at the Ecole du Louvre, a prestigious Parisian art institute unrelated to the museum. In 2003 she wrote a dense 100-page book on the painting "to dispel the myths" around it. "Doing bestsellers with Léonard," she says, "is not my thing."
Neither is reading "The Da Vinci Code," the hugely popular thriller in which an elderly Louvre curator gets murdered. "It's commercial," she sniffs.
Tour guide Sonia Brunel, an art historian, also bristles at the mass-marketing of the Mona Lisa . She says she often has a hard time getting near the painting to explain it. Instead, she talks standing across the room and waits for tourists to snap each other's portrait with the portrait. She usually starts tours in Mona Lisa's room to get it out of the way so she can "be more relaxed" on her circuit, although she would rather walk the museum in chronological order.
Not everyone complains. Louvre security supervisor Marthe Duro recalls her days guarding Mona Lisa as "a privilege." She adds that guards on Mona Lisa duty "really earn a day's wages."
Jean-Pierre Mohen, director of the Center for Research and Restoration of the Museums of France, who handled the X-ray last fall, recalls the moments when he paused to admire da Vinci's "genius" in Mona Lisa's hands and eyes, unfettered by protective glass. "Those were powerful moments," he says.
Even curators of the Louvre's other artworks, which most tourists rush past to see the Mona Lisa , don't begrudge Mona Lisa's popularity. Grousing about that would be "like complaining of being rich," says Olivier Mesley, the Louvre's conservator of English and Spanish paintings.
Mona Lisa keeps up her brave face for people like the Greenbaum family from New York. As Steven, a student in his 20s, takes photos, his mother notes that if they visited Paris and didn't see the painting, "People would say there's something wrong with you."
That attitude is why Louvre officials recently informed 6,000 travel companies about Mona Lisa's day off. A warning pops up on the museum's Web site, and alerts now appear in 10 languages on museum maps.
On that day, Mona Lisa will return after four years to her old room, which now boasts improved lighting, better crowd circulation and special antireflection glass to protect her. The installation will happen behind closed doors on a Monday, when the Louvre is open, so that French officials can dedicate her new abode the next day -- when the Louvre is closed -- undisturbed by museum-goers.
The return is the latest leg of an eventful journey. Scholars believe that in 1503, wealthy Florentine merchant Francesco del Giocondo commissioned da Vinci to paint Lisa, his third wife, then 24. "Mona," short for madonna, is the Italian equivalent of "ma'am." Da Vinci spent almost four years applying oil paints and layers of varnish to a poplar board. Why he never delivered the portrait remains unclear. In 1516 he moved to France and took Mona Lisa . She remained there when he died in 1519.
In 1798, during the French Revolution, Mona Lisa entered the Louvre, newly converted into a museum. In 1800, Napoleon borrowed "Madame Lise" for four years to hang in his bedroom. But it was larceny that elevated the masterpiece to global fame.
Early on Aug. 21, 1911, Italian artist and Louvre employee Vincenzo Peruggia removed the painting from its frame and walked out of the closed museum. Newspapers hyped the mysterious kidnapping. The painting's return in 1913 sparked celebrations in France and Italy, where Mr. Peruggia was caught.
Back in Paris, Mona Lisa's reputation soared, although problems continued. In 1956 an attacker threw acid at the painting. Several months later an assailant threw a stone. The Louvre placed her behind glass.
Then, visiting the U.S. in 1963, she was the toast of Washington and New York. In 1974, Tokyo fêted her for two months. Ever since, she's been as firmly planted in Paris as the Eiffel Tower.
"The Louvre without Mona Lisa ," says Ms. Brunel, the lecturer, "wouldn't be the Louvre."
别围在微笑的《蒙娜丽莎》面前
下周一，也就是4月4日，法国罗浮宫(Louvre Museum)的参观者们将无缘欣赏到《蒙娜丽莎》(Mona Lisa)，这在三十年里还是头一回。
这幅由意大利画家达芬奇(Leonardo da Vinci)创作的名画上次离开罗浮宫是在1974年，当时前往日本展出。如今，原先安放《蒙娜丽莎》的展厅修葺一新，即将重新开放，也许今后这幅杰作再也不会离开罗浮宫了吧。前往巴黎的游客几乎都会造访罗浮宫，而90%以上的造访者都会直奔微笑著的《蒙娜丽莎》而去。罗浮宫礼品店每年出售的关于《蒙娜丽莎》的纪念品高达33万件以上，其中包括20万张明信片、2万颗磁石和1万个智力玩具。
罗浮宫一直担心：如果千里迢迢到此一游的日本和美国游客发现本应悬挂《蒙娜丽莎》的墙上竟然一片空白，只张贴著抱歉公告，他们会恼羞成怒。因此，虽然荷兰画家伦布兰特(Rembrandts)、意大利画家提香(Titians)和西班牙画家葛雷柯(El Grecos)的作品每年可以有几周时间停止对公众开放，用于修缮、研究或巡展，《蒙娜丽莎》却始终对外展出。
这可让《蒙娜丽莎》的监护人塞西尔?斯卡利雷兹(Cecile Scaillierez)在过去二十年里不得太平。现年47岁的斯卡利雷兹是位艺术史学家，只有每周二罗浮宫闭馆时她才有充裕的时间研究这幅画，除此之外就只是利用零星时间。《蒙娜丽莎》这三十年来的首次X光照则是在夜间进行的。
公众对《蒙娜丽莎》的痴迷也给罗浮宫的其他工作人员带来了意想不到的问题─导游们抱怨游客对《蒙娜丽莎》的狂热崇拜几近偏执；保安人员抱怨陈列《蒙娜丽莎》的展厅里总是喧嚣不已、闪光灯此起彼伏，还有没完没了的小偷。在去年11月为《蒙娜丽莎》拍X光的专家虽然经验丰富，但当时依然紧张不安，莫名其妙地抱怨天花板上的一个灯泡可能会掉下来砸到这幅名画。《蒙娜丽莎》曾经历一次被盗和两次袭击，因此需要特别保护。
目前，《蒙娜丽莎》的展厅已经整修完毕，每小时平均能接待1,500多名参观者。这幅画将在4月4日暂停对外展出，罗浮宫的管理人员将把它安放在翻修好的展厅里。在该展厅装修期间，《蒙娜丽莎》临时占用了另一个本来陈列得满满的展厅。
简而言之，《蒙娜丽莎》就像一个光芒四射的大众偶像，这给管理人员提出了非常非常高的要求。
“真是麻烦，”斯卡利雷兹说，“如何管理这个博物馆得听她的”。
在斯卡利雷兹负责监护《蒙娜丽莎》的这二十年里，人们对它的迷恋崇拜不断升级。今天，《蒙娜丽莎》每周至少会收到一位“粉丝”的来信，而在斯卡利雷兹看来不少信件都是蛮“古怪的”。她力争有信必回，包括她最近收到的一位数字命理学家的亲笔信，声称无意间发现了这幅画的尺寸与达芬奇的生日之间的“奇妙”联系。
“每个人都有自己的发现，”斯卡利雷兹说。
在前不久的一个周二，斯卡利雷兹站在《蒙娜丽莎》面前，静静地欣赏著这幅名作。尽管不时被下属打断，她仍表示，“《蒙娜丽莎》令人忘记了时间”。
斯卡利雷兹是17世纪欧洲艺术的爱好者，曾就读于巴黎著名的高等艺术院校罗浮宫学院(Ecole du Louvre)。她习惯于用“伦纳德”(Leonard)来称呼达芬奇，那是达芬奇的法语译音。在2003年，斯卡利雷兹编写了一本关于《蒙娜丽莎》的小书，内容精炼，只有100页，旨在“打破关于该画的种种神话”。“利用伦纳德来撰写畅销书可不是我打算做的事，”她说。
她也没有读过时下大受欢迎的惊险小说《达芬奇的密码》(The Da Vinci Code)，该书是以一位罗浮宫老馆长遭到谋杀为背景的。“这完全是商业行为，”斯卡利雷兹说。
罗浮宫的导游、艺术史学家索尼亚?布鲁内尔(Sonia Brunel)对于围绕《蒙娜丽莎》的大肆宣传也是深恶痛绝。她常常很难靠近《蒙娜丽莎》进行解说，而是不得不站在展厅一侧，等待游客们一一从这幅画前闪过，上下打量。尽管布鲁内尔更喜欢按照时间顺序带领游客参观罗浮宫，她通常会把《蒙娜丽莎》作为参观的第一站，以便让自己一路上“放松一些”。
并非每个人都感到不满。罗浮宫的保安主管马莎?杜若(Marthe Duro)回忆说，守护《蒙娜丽莎》的日子对她来说是一种“殊荣”。她还补充说，《蒙娜丽莎》的保安人员赚的钱是“受之无愧的”。
让?皮埃尔?莫汉(Jean-Pierre Mohen)是法国博物馆研究修复中心(Center for Research and Restoration of the Museums of France)的主任，就是他在去年秋天对《蒙娜丽莎》拍摄了X光照片。他回忆起自己驻足仰视达芬奇的神来之笔─《蒙娜丽莎》的手和眼睛时的情景，当时防护玻璃已经卸去。“那真是激动人心的时刻，”他说。
尽管游客对罗浮宫的其他艺术品只是匆匆瞥上两眼，有关监护人员并没有对《蒙娜丽莎》的显赫名声感到愤愤不平。罗浮宫负责管理英美两国画家作品的奥利弗?梅斯利(Olivier Mesley)说：“对此埋怨就像富人抱怨自己富有一样，是无病呻吟。”
《蒙娜丽莎》在见多识广的海外游客面前依然魅力四射。 当二十岁出头的学生史蒂文(Steven)在巴黎拍照时，他母亲提醒他说如果到了巴黎而不去瞻仰《蒙娜丽莎》，“那人们就会说你一定有问题”。
有鉴于此，罗浮宫的管理层最近通知6,000家旅行社《蒙娜丽莎》将在4月4日停止展出。罗浮宫的网站上也张贴了有关提示，网站地图上的警示已增加到10种语言。
4月4日那天，《蒙娜丽莎》将在历经4年后重新回到修缮后的展厅，那里的采光和客流设计都得到改善，并且加装了特殊的抗反射玻璃。《蒙娜丽莎》的搬迁将在罗浮宫当天闭馆之后进行，由于4日是周一，有关人士可在次日休馆时专心致志地进行布置，不受游客的打扰。
此番重归故里为《蒙娜丽莎》的一系列搬迁活动又添上了一笔。学者们普遍认为在1503年，富有的佛罗伦萨商人弗朗西斯科?奇科多(Francesco del Giocondo)委托达芬奇为自己的第三任妻子、24岁的丽莎(Lisa)作画。Moda是madonna的缩写，在意大利语中表示“夫人”。达芬奇花费了将近4年的时间在画板上涂涂抹抹，并刷上数层清漆。不过，他为什么不交画依然是个谜。1516年，达芬奇带著这幅画来到了法国。之后，《蒙娜丽莎》一直伴随著达芬奇，直到画家于1519年过世。
在1798年法国大革命时期，《蒙娜丽莎》进入了后被改建为博物馆的罗浮宫。在1800年，拿破仑(Napoleon)借走了这幅画达4年之久，一直挂在他的卧室里。不过，使《蒙娜丽莎》蜚声全球的是一起偷盗案。
在1911年8月21日，意大利艺术家、罗浮宫的工作人员温森?佩格拉(Vincenzo Peruggia)乘闭馆时把《蒙娜丽莎》从画框里取下来，偷偷地溜出了罗浮宫。报纸对这起神秘的失窃案大肆渲染。《蒙娜丽莎》后于1913年重回罗浮宫，在法国和意大利引起了轰动，佩格拉也落入了法网。
回到巴黎后，《蒙娜丽莎》名声大振，尽管问题也接踵而至。在1956年，有人把酸性液体泼向这幅画；几个月后又有人扔石头。于是，罗浮宫为《蒙娜丽莎》安装了玻璃。
之后，《蒙娜丽莎》于1963年赴美巡展，成为华盛顿和纽约的座上宾。1974年，东京有幸展览了这幅画达两个月之久。从此之后，《蒙娜丽莎》和埃菲尔铁塔(Eiffel Tower)一样在巴黎生了根。
“没有《蒙娜丽莎》，罗浮宫就不再是罗浮宫了，”布鲁内尔说。
