Reuters, PARIS – A visitor to the Louvre tried to destroy the glass shielding the world’s most famous painting before smearing cream across its surface in an apparent climate-related publicity stunt on Sunday, but the Mona Lisa was left disturbed but uninjured.
A man dressed as an elderly lady jumped out of a wheelchair and smashed the window.
“Perhaps this is just nuts to me…,” the author of a video of the incident’s aftermath, which shows a Louvre employee wiping the glass, wrote. “(He) then smears cake over the glass and throws roses all over the place before being tackled by security.”
The Louvre was not immediately available for comment.
Another video posted on social media showed the same staffer finishing cleaning the pane while another attendant removes a wheelchair from in front of the Da Vinci masterpiece.
“Think of the earth, people are destroying the earth”, the man, dressed in a wig, said in French in another video posting that showed him being led away from the Paris gallery with the wheelchair, indicating that the incident likely had an environmentalist motive.
