A 36-year-old man has been arrested and placed in psychiatric care after smearing the Mona Lisa on a glass screen with cake, prosecutors on Monday accused the cast of not focusing enough on “the planet.” Said in an alleged protest against.
Authorities at the Louvre Museum in Paris declined to comment on Sunday’s strange incident, which was captured in multiple phones and circulated widely on social media.
Leonardo da Vinci’s prized work, which has been the target of vandalism attempts in the past, remained unaffected thanks to its bulletproof glass case.
A Twitter user, identified as Lukey, posted a video showing one museum employee wiping dirt off glass and another showing a man dressed in white being escorted away by security guards.
“A man dressed as an old woman jumps out of a wheelchair and attempts to break the Mona Lisa’s bulletproof glass. Then proceeds to put a cake on the glass and throws roses everywhere, before tackling to security ,” Lucie wrote.
Speaking French, the man says: “There are people who are destroying the Earth… All the artists, think about the Earth. That’s why I did it. Think of the planet.”
No photographs depicting the actual incident have emerged.
The Paris prosecutor’s office said an investigation had been launched into “an attempt to sabotage a cultural act”.
The Mona Lisa has been lying behind glass since a Bolivian man threw a stone at a painting in December 1956, injuring his left elbow. In 2005, it was housed in a reinforced case that also regulates temperature and humidity.
In 2009, a Russian woman threw an empty cup at the painting, slightly scratching the case.
The Louvre is the world’s largest museum, with hundreds of thousands of works that attracted nearly 10 million visitors a year before the COVID-19 pandemic.
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