蒙娜麗莎該走了

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——即便是在一個(gè)優(yōu)秀秋展云集的城市，從大皇宮(Grand Palais)的埃爾·格列柯(El Greco)回顧展，到路易·威登基金會(huì)(Fondation Louis Vuitton)的夏洛特·佩里安(Charlotte Perriand)展覽，這里的本季重頭戲，仍是十年磨一劍的盧浮宮列奧納多·達(dá)·芬奇(Leonardo da Vinci)展。這場深入而嚴(yán)肅的展覽的限時(shí)門票已經(jīng)賣到了十一月底，它將破除縈繞在這位產(chǎn)量最低的文藝復(fù)興大師身上的許多迷思。在這里，你將看到一個(gè)更潔凈、更有生氣的列奧納多——或者至少你將在樓下的展覽中看到，他的五幅盧浮宮藏畫中的四幅被搬到了樓下。

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

列奧納多最著名的作品留在了樓上，而那里，現(xiàn)在仍是一片混亂。

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.

盧浮宮擁有全歐洲最偉大的藝術(shù)收藏，這座宮殿本身就是一件杰作。它是世界上最受歡迎的博物館，甩開第二名許多。2018年，創(chuàng)紀(jì)錄的1000萬游客——其中四分之三是外國游客——涌入這個(gè)地方：比前一年增加了25%，是蓬皮杜中心(Centre Pompidou)或奧賽博物館(Musée d’Orsay)游客人數(shù)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.

而盧浮宮卻已被16世紀(jì)意大利肖像畫中的金·卡戴珊(Kim Kardashian)劫持：俊美卻只是略微有趣的麗莎·蓋拉爾迪尼(Lisa Gherardini)——人稱(隨夫姓)拉·喬孔達(dá)(La Gioconda)——她的名望遠(yuǎn)遠(yuǎn)超過了自身的重要性，以至于甚至無人記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.

根據(jù)盧浮宮的調(diào)查，大約80%的游客來這里是為看《蒙娜麗莎》——而大多數(shù)人離開時(shí)都不開心。在20世紀(jì)的小有名氣本來已經(jīng)很滿足了，然而在這個(gè)大眾旅游和數(shù)字自戀的時(shí)代，她卻成了一個(gè)反藝術(shù)的黑洞，把博物館翻了個(gè)底朝天。

Enough!

夠了!

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.

剛剛過去的夏天，在超過37度的高溫下，盧浮宮對(duì)《蒙娜麗莎》的展廳——位于德農(nóng)館(Denon)的拱形眾國廳(Salle des États)——進(jìn)行了翻修，那里曾是法國議會(huì)所在地。這真是一團(tuán)糟?！睹赡塞惿钒岬嚼枞麴^(Richelieu)后，盧浮宮的弗拉芒畫派藏品已經(jīng)淪為牛棚里的墻紙，保安驅(qū)趕著怒氣沖沖、汗流浹背、已經(jīng)忍受了半小時(shí)長隊(duì)的自拍者們。過度擁擠如此嚴(yán)重，以至于博物館不得不關(guān)門好幾天。“盧浮宮快窒息了，”發(fā)起罷工的盧浮宮保安人員工會(huì)發(fā)表聲明說。

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.)

現(xiàn)在，《蒙娜麗莎》又回到了她原來的位置，掛在一面獨(dú)立的墻上，墻上重新刷了一種不得不承認(rèn)很別致的普魯士藍(lán)。(列奧納多回顧展的兩名策展人之一路易斯·弗蘭克[Louis Frank]告訴我，把《蒙娜麗莎》納入展覽絕無可能。展覽每天“只能”接待5000人參觀;眾國廳要接待3萬人。)

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.

盧浮宮本身并不存在擁擠的問題。只是有《蒙娜麗莎》的問題。其他任何標(biāo)志性的畫作——佛羅倫薩烏菲茲美術(shù)館藏波提切利的《維納斯的誕生》、維也納貝爾維德爾美術(shù)館藏克里姆特的《吻》、紐約現(xiàn)代藝術(shù)博物館藏《星夜》——都無法像蒙娜麗莎那樣壟斷整個(gè)博物館的注意力。如果游客數(shù)量繼續(xù)增長，如果去年的1000萬游客明年變成1100萬或1200萬，這個(gè)地方就會(huì)崩潰。

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

盧浮宮是時(shí)候承認(rèn)失敗了。蒙娜麗莎該走了。