Art attack: The Mona Lisa isn't the only masterpiece vandals have targeted

The Da Vinci painting, though, is among the works that have come under attack most frequently

On Sunday, May 29, a man in his 30s entered the Louvre Museum in Paris disguised as an elderly woman in a wheelchair and threw cake at the Mona Lisa. Leonardo da Vinci's masterpiece was, however, undamaged, thanks to the protective glass, which was left smeared with cake. The man then threw roses around the display, before being escorted away by security.

This was not the first instance of someone trying to vandalise the Mona Lisa, and it’s hardly the first episode of a masterpiece being attacked. Here are some others.

The Mona Lisa braves acid, rock – and a mug

In 1956, while the Mona Lisa was on display at Montauban, France, a vandal threw acid at the painting, damaging the lower part of the masterpiece. Later the same year, a South American tourist hurled a rock at the painting, shattering the protective glass case and chipping the paint a little. That part of the painting had to be restored.

 

Then in 1974, while on display at the Tokyo National Museum, the painting again came under attack. This time, a differently abled tourist sprayed red paint over the protective glass case to register her protest against lack of access to the differently abled. And in 2009, disgruntled over being denied French citizenship, a Russian woman decided to express her anger by hurling a mug at the painting while it hung at the Louvre.

Mona Lisa vandalised: Reuters

Faceless figures get eyes

In February this year, a bored security guard used a ballpoint pen to draw eyes on two figures in Anna Leporskaya’s painting, “Three Figures”. The painting was valued at 75 million rubles ($1.4 million) and its restoration cost about 250,000 rubles.

This was the guard’s first day at work at the Boris Yeltsin Presidential Centre in Russia. He was let go from his job for his “stupid mistake”.

Three Figures- The Art Newspaper Russia

Pablo Picasso’s Guernica spray-painted

In 1974, a man sprayed the words “Kill lies all” across Pablo Picasso’s 1937 masterpiece, “Guernica”, when it hung at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). The anti-war masterpiece was ironically defaced to protest America’s involvement in the Vietnam War. The vandal, Tony Shafrazi, called himself an artist and later went on to become an art dealer.

The iconic piece, in which Picasso protested the German bombing of the Basque city of Guernica, was saved by a heavy coat of varnish “that acted as an invisible shield”, William Rubin, who was then MoMA’s director of painting and sculpture, had told The New York Times.

Claude Monet’s scenery punched through

In 2012, CCTV cameras at the National Gallery of Ireland captured a man punching Claude Monet’s “Argenteuil Basin with a Single Sailboat”, leaving it with a large hole in the middle. The man, identified as Andrew Shannon, was taken into custody and later sent to prison for six years.

Painted by the French impressionist, the work was valued at eight million euros, and was placed behind protective glass – a low reflective, ultraviolet-filtered climate box with a humidity buffer, after being restored over 18 months, the BBC had reported.

Claude Monet: National Gallery of Ireland

Kiss of love

In 1997, Andy Warhol’s free-hand painting, “Bathtub”, came under “gentle vandalism” when a woman kissed the subject, leaving the imprint of her lips in red. The BBC reported that it took almost eight hours to “clean the kiss off, fibre by fibre”.

In a similar incident in 2007, Rindy Sam, a 30-year-old French artist, was fined for leaving a lipstick imprint on an all-white canvas by American artist Cy Twombly. The painting, measuring nine by six feet, was estimated to be worth $2,830,000. During the trial, the woman defended her action as “an act of love”.