The Mona Lisa's room-mates

I thought it might be interesting to have a look at the paintings that share the Mona Lisa's gallery in the Louvre. So many images of the Salle des Etats are limited to  the Mona Lisa's glass cell on the end wall and ignore the other Renaissance paintings by Venetian artists or painters working in Venice in the 16th century that are hung in her purpose designed room. The purpose of this vast space is to shuffle about six million visitors past the Mona Lisa every year.

Salle des Etats, Mona Lisa on far wall

Let's look at the gallery first and get that out of the way. The plain walls and austere skylight, so different to the original domed glass is very dull indeed.

Of course the Salle des Etats has a much more colourful past. It was the principal state room of Charles-Louis Napoléon Bonaparte, nephew and heir of Napoleon. Napoleon's second wife, (you remember the first was Josephine of not tonight darling & don't leave me Boney fame) Marie-Therese of Austria went home to Daddy, the Emperor of Austria, after Napoleon was finally consigned to the South Atlantic's least desirable tourist destination, St Helena.

Marie-Therese took Napoleon's son and heir with her and never came back to France. That left Napoleon's nephew to take the throne whenever France decided it wanted another despotic ruler.

Napoleon III with his architect

Napoleon III came to the throne as Emperor after first being elected President of the Second Empire. When his term as President expired in 1851 he staged a coup d'état and took the throne where he remained until 1870. During that time he lived in the Tuileries and laid plans to reunite the Louvre with the Tuileries Palace.

The Salle des Etats was his principal room for doing the business of the Empire and it looked rather different to its austere design today, more like a throne room.

The present Salle des Etats design was finished in 2005. The pictures that share the space with La Joconde, as the French call her, are varied and interesting. Let's look at two of them.

This is detail from Veronese's Wedding at Cana or the Wedding Feast at Cana as the Louvre describes it. It's nearly overwhelming in its detail. This section shows wine being poured from jars into which water had been added. When the host ran out of wine Christ performed his first miracle in a precursor to the Eucharist. The whole painting looks like this.

You need a guidebook to get a grip on it and half a day to stand in the gallery and get everything straight in your head. The Louvre's description includes this extract:

"Veronese mixes the sacred and the profane in establishing the decor. Religious symbols of the Passion are found next to luxurious 16th-century silver vessels and tableware. The furniture, the dresser, the ewer, and the crystal goblets and vases reveal the feast in all its splendor. Each table guest has an individual place setting, complete with napkin, fork, and knife. In this doubling of meaning, no detail escapes the artist's eye. While in the center of the composition a servant slices meat, symbolic of the body of Christ, quinces—symbols of marriage—are served as dessert to the guests."


That's terrific but let's move onto something much simpler, a painting of hounds. I love dogs and these guys look as though they'd be your faithful friends forever.

The title is Two Hunting Dogs Tied to a Tree Stump. It was done by Jacopo Bassano and completed in 1548. The two Italian pointers were owned by Antonio Zentani whose emblem was two dogs tied to a tree.

Dogs became important in Renaissance art as symbols of loyalty and Bassano's painting was much admired. Tintoretto copied one of Bassano's pointers and included it in his monumental painting Christ Washing the Disciples' Feet, below.

So Lisa is not alone in her glass tomb after all. She has lots of guests and dogs, the best companions, to keep her company. Of course, there's much more.