Beyond the Mona Lisa: Exploring the Louvre Museum + How to Visit Without the Overwhelm with Elaine Sciolino

·59 min·5 clips

Elaine Sciolino calls a mercenary painting the undiscovered Mona Lisa she'd take to a desert island.

Elaine Sciolino has lived in Paris for more than 20 years and previously served as the New York Times chief diplomatic correspondent, the first woman to hold that role. Her book Adventures in the Louvre grew out of years of exploration and interviews with the museum's curators, including Sebastian Allar, the head of paintings. She explains that the Louvre's identity as the world's most visited museum is inseparable from one painting: the Mona Lisa, which accounts for roughly 70 percent of first-time visitors. Sciolino traces the Mona Lisa's global celebrity to 1911, when Italian nationalist Vincenzo Peruggia stole the painting and kept it under his bed for nearly two years. The theft became a global front-page story at the exact moment modern newspaper printing had made mass media possible, turning the painting into an international icon it remains today. Sciolino describes the actual experience of visiting the Mona Lisa as often disappointing: the painting is small, hung too high and too far from viewers, and surrounded by hundreds of people taking selfies, all after standing in line for up to an hour even with a timed ticket. She recommends visitors seek out less-visited works instead, including Titian's Man with a Glove in the same room as the Mona Lisa, and her personal favorite, Antonello da Messina's Condottiero, which she calls the undiscovered Mona Lisa. The episode covers the Louvre's Persian antiquities collection from ancient Susa, Islamic art galleries that are quiet and calm even on busy days, animal mummies in the Egyptian section, and a hidden cache of Impressionist works donated on condition they remain in the Louvre. Sciolino also reveals that regular visitors can book consultations in the graphic arts department to handle Durer engravings and Delacroix drawings one-on-one at an oak desk with no glass between them. The crown jewels section recounts how most of the French crown jewels were auctioned off in 1887, with Charles Tiffany buying a third of the inventory, and how the Hope Diamond now in the Smithsonian was originally the blue diamond of Louis XIV. The tone is warm, enthusiastic, and full of insider stories. The episode is ideal for travelers planning a Paris trip, art lovers, and anyone interested in cultural history.

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