A plan to take the Mona Lisa on a “grand tour” of France has been reportedly put on the back burner after the Louvre estimated it would cost up to €35 million to loan its crown jewel for just three months, reports The Telegraph.
The museum came to the “astronomical” figure by factoring in transport costs and lost revenue from disappointed tourists, ninety per cent of whom say their prime reason to visit the Louvre is to see the world’s best known painting.
Last month, Françoise Nyssen, the culture minister, said she was “seriously considering” sending the Mona Lisa to Lens, a former mining town in northern France where the Louvre has an outpost.
The plan is part of a concerted drive to move top artworks out of Parisian museums and around the country in doing so break down the “cultural segregation” with deprived areas.
However, the minister was said to be reconsidering moving the Leonardo Da Vinci’s 16th century masterpiece after being shown an estimation of the costs of the move.
According to Le Parisien, which received a breakdown of the figures, it would cost €2 million to insure the painting, another €2-3 million to pay for groundbreaking new protective glass, another €3 million for protective wrapping and a further one to two million for transport.
But the highest costs, the museum’s audit calculated, would be the estimated €13 million in lost revenues from cancelled bookings by foreign tourists disappointed to learn of the famed painting’s absence.