The Mona Lisa Queue Is Everything Wrong With How We Visit Museums

This is the Salle des États at the Louvre. The crowd is queuing behind stanchions, phones raised, shuffling forward in a managed line supervised by security staff in black suits. The sign at the front reads “Accès réservé et sans attente pour la personne en situation de han-” — the disability access lane, one of the few ways to approach the thing without joining the cattle run. Everyone else waits. For this.

The Mona Lisa is 77 by 53 centimeters. It hangs on the far wall behind bulletproof glass, behind a barrier, across a room that holds several hundred people at any given moment. What you see from the queue is a small dark rectangle at considerable distance, surrounded by a frame, surrounded by people photographing it on phones that will produce images inferior in every respect to the ones freely available on Wikipedia. The experience of seeing the Mona Lisa in person, for most visitors, is the experience of photographing a crowd photographing a painting.

Now turn around. The painting covering the entire opposite wall — the one nobody is queuing for, the one visible in the background of every Mona Lisa crowd photo ever taken — is Veronese’s Wedding at Cana, completed in 1563. It is roughly ten meters wide and six meters tall. It contains over 130 figures, architectural detail of extraordinary precision, a color palette that has survived four and a half centuries in better condition than it has any right to, and a compositional intelligence that rewards sustained looking in a way that a 53-centimeter portrait behind glass simply cannot. It is one of the largest and most accomplished paintings in the Western canon. On a normal day at the Louvre, you can stand directly in front of it, alone, for as long as you want.

The Louvre has approximately 35,000 works. The tourist infrastructure of central Paris — the queues, the timed tickets, the guided group tours, the selfie sticks — funnels the majority of visitors toward perhaps a dozen of them. The rest of the museum operates at a pace and a scale that is genuinely pleasurable. The Dutch and Flemish rooms are quiet. The Mesopotamian antiquities are nearly empty. The Richelieu wing on a weekday afternoon is what museums are supposed to feel like.

Skip the Mona Lisa. You have already seen it. Everyone has already seen it. Go find something you haven’t.