Meeting the ‘Mona Lisa’ for an Intimate (Virtual) Rendezvous
Mona Lisa’s lingering smile remains the same, but she is getting a first-of-its-kind virtual makeover from the Louvre Museum, which has struggled this year with the popularity of Leonardo da Vinci’s masterpiece and the throngs of selfie-snapping tourists.
With a blockbuster Leonardo exhibition fast approaching, the Louvre and its production partners are fine-tuning a virtual reality tour with three-dimensional views of the portrait that look beyond the jostling crowds, the shatterproof glass case and the layers of varnish from restorations and the fading green patina.
The virtual reality tour will be a more intimate encounter. The VR tour, designed to remedy the problem of crowds and distance, will be housed in a small gallery room near the main Leonardo exhibition and apart from the “Mona Lisa.”
The gallery, equipped with 15 headset stations, will offer seven-minute virtual tours that begin in a familiar crush of visitors with mobile phones aloft. They lead through a gallery of paintings to the portrait of Mona Lisa, the wife of an Italian silk merchant.
In this virtual land of Leonardo, spectators eventually fly over a valley and jagged hills aboard a wing-flapping glider he sketched (and which appears in the traditional exhibition).
In September, Franck Riester, France’s minister of culture, unveiled a project to develop a thousand “micro-follies,” or digital pop-up museums, over the next three years in rural and suburban locations — including movie theaters, libraries, social centers and even hair salons. France intends to spend 3 million euros to offer virtual reality and 2D digital tours to show off the masterworks of a dozen major Paris museums, including, potentially, the Louvre’s “Mona Lisa” tour.
The reactions of visitors impressed Louvre officials. “Not only young people were using it. There were people over 65, including my father, who is 83,” said Ms. de Font-Réaulx, of the Louvre.
See the full story here: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/15/arts/design/mona-lisa-vr-louvre.html