蒙娜丽莎该走了

PARIS — Even in a city saturated with excellent fall exhibitions, from the Grand Palais’s retrospective of El Greco to the Fondation Louis Vuitton’s showcase of Charlotte Perriand, the show of the season here is the decade-in-the-works “Leonardo da Vinci,” at the Musée du Louvre. Mandatory timed tickets are sold out through November for this thorough, deeply serious exhibition, which sloughs off the myths that cling to this least productive of Renaissance masters. You will find here a cleaner, sprightlier Leonardo — or at least you will in the show downstairs, where four of the Louvre’s five paintings by the artist have been relocated.

巴黎——即便是在一个优秀秋展云集的城市，从大皇宫(Grand Palais)的埃尔·格列柯(El Greco)回顾展，到路易·威登基金会(Fondation Louis Vuitton)的夏洛特·佩里安(Charlotte Perriand)展览，这里的本季重头戏，仍是十年磨一剑的卢浮宫列奥纳多·达·芬奇(Leonardo da Vinci)展。这场深入而严肃的展览的限时门票已经卖到了十一月底，它将破除萦绕在这位产量最低的文艺复兴大师身上的许多迷思。在这里，你将看到一个更洁净、更有生气的列奥纳多——或者至少你将在楼下的展览中看到，他的五幅卢浮宫藏画中的四幅被搬到了楼下。

Upstairs, where Leonardo’s most famous work remains, is still a fiasco.

列奥纳多最著名的作品留在了楼上，而那里，现在仍是一片混乱。

The Louvre houses the greatest collection of art anywhere in Europe, within a palace that is a masterpiece in its own right. It is, by some distance, the most popular museum in the world. In 2018 a record 10 million visitors, three-quarters of them foreign tourists, besieged the joint: up 25 percent on the previous year, and more than triple the attendance of the Centre Pompidou or the Musée d’Orsay.

卢浮宫拥有全欧洲最伟大的艺术收藏，这座宫殿本身就是一件杰作。它是世界上最受欢迎的博物馆，甩开第二名许多。2018年，创纪录的1000万游客——其中四分之三是外国游客——涌入这个地方：比前一年增加了25%，是蓬皮杜中心(Centre Pompidou)或奥赛博物馆(Musée d’Orsay)游客人数的三倍多。

Yet the Louvre is being held hostage by the Kim Kardashian of 16th-century Italian portraiture: the handsome but only moderately interesting Lisa Gherardini, better known (after her husband) as La Gioconda, whose renown so eclipses her importance that no one can even remember how she got famous in the first place.

而卢浮宫却已被16世纪意大利肖像画中的金·卡戴珊(Kim Kardashian)劫持：俊美却只是略微有趣的丽莎·盖拉尔迪尼(Lisa Gherardini)——人称(随夫姓)拉·乔孔达(La Gioconda)——她的名望远远超过了自身的重要性，以至于甚至无人记得她最初是如何成名的。

Some 80 percent of visitors, according to the Louvre’s research, are here for the Mona Lisa — and most of them leave unhappy. Content in the 20th century to be merely famous, she has become, in this age of mass tourism and digital narcissism, a black hole of anti-art who has turned the museum inside out.

根据卢浮宫的调查，大约80%的游客来这里是为看《蒙娜丽莎》——而大多数人离开时都不开心。在20世纪的小有名气本来已经很满足了，然而在这个大众旅游和数字自恋的时代，她却成了一个反艺术的黑洞，把博物馆翻了个底朝天。

Enough!

够了!

This past summer, amid 100-degree-plus heat, the Louvre undertook a renovation of the Mona Lisa’s gallery: the arching Salle des États, in the museum’s Denon wing, which once housed Parliament of France. What a mess this was. Relocated to the Richelieu painting wing, the Mona Lisa reduced the museum’s Flemish collection into wallpaper for a cattle pen, where guards shooed along irritated, sweaty selfie-snappers who’d endured a half-hour line. The overcrowding was so bad, the museum had to shut its doors on several days. “The Louvre is suffocating,” said a statement from the union of the museum’s security staff, who went on strike.

刚刚过去的夏天，在超过37度的高温下，卢浮宫对《蒙娜丽莎》的展厅——位于德农馆(Denon)的拱形众国厅(Salle des États)——进行了翻修，那里曾是法国议会所在地。这真是一团糟。《蒙娜丽莎》搬到黎塞留馆(Richelieu)后，卢浮宫的弗拉芒画派藏品已经沦为牛棚里的墙纸，保安驱赶着怒气冲冲、汗流浃背、已经忍受了半小时长队的自拍者们。过度拥挤如此严重，以至于博物馆不得不关门好几天。“卢浮宫快窒息了，”发起罢工的卢浮宫保安人员工会发表声明说。

Now the Mona Lisa is back in her regular spot, on a freestanding wall that’s been repainted an admittedly chic Prussian blue. (Louis Frank, one of the two curators of the Leonardo retrospective, told me there was never any possibility of including the Mona Lisa in the show. The exhibition can “only” be visited by 5,000 people per day; the Salle des États gets 30,000.)

现在，《蒙娜丽莎》又回到了她原来的位置，挂在一面独立的墙上，墙上重新刷了一种不得不承认很别致的普鲁士蓝。(列奥纳多回顾展的两名策展人之一路易斯·弗兰克[Louis Frank]告诉我，把《蒙娜丽莎》纳入展览绝无可能。展览每天“只能”接待5000人参观;众国厅要接待3万人。)

The Louvre does not have an overcrowding problem per se. It has a Mona Lisa problem. No other iconic painting — not Botticelli’s “Birth of Venus” at the Uffizi in Florence, not Klimt’s “Kiss” at the Belvedere in Vienna, not “Starry Night” at the Museum of Modern Art in New York — comes anywhere close to monopolizing its institution like she does. And if tourist numbers continue to rise, if last year’s 10 million visitors become next year’s 11 or 12, the place is going to crack.

卢浮宫本身并不存在拥挤的问题。只是有《蒙娜丽莎》的问题。其他任何标志性的画作——佛罗伦萨乌菲兹美术馆藏波提切利的《维纳斯的诞生》、维也纳贝尔维德尔美术馆藏克里姆特的《吻》、纽约现代艺术博物馆藏《星夜》——都无法像蒙娜丽莎那样垄断整个博物馆的注意力。如果游客数量继续增长，如果去年的1000万游客明年变成1100万或1200万，这个地方就会崩溃。

It is time for the Louvre to admit defeat. It is time for the Mona Lisa to go.

卢浮宫是时候承认失败了。蒙娜丽莎该走了。