The Mona Lisa painting was subjected to a bizarre attack orchestrated by an eco-warrior, this past Sunday.
Watch: Climate activist attacks Mona Lisa painting
Chaos erupted inside the Louvre Museum in Paris, France, when a man, disguised in a wig, and makeup got up from his wheelchair and made a number of brazen attempts at destroying Leonardo Da Vinci’s 16th Century masterpiece.
Eyewitnesses, according to AFP, recalled how, at first, the wheelchair-bound attendant, thought to be an elderly disabled woman, was granted preference to observe the painting up-close from the front row.
Then, out of nowhere, the attacker suddenly got up and brazenly tried to smash the painting’s bulletproof glass casing. When he did not succeed, he whipped out a piece of cake and smeared it across Da Vinci’s masterpiece.
“Think of the Earth! There are people who are destroying the Earth. Think about it. Artists tell you: think of the Earth. That’s why I did this,” he exclaimed before being tackled by the museum’s security staff.
Fortunately, the Mona Lisa painting was not destroyed and the eco-warrior was ushered away to a nearby jailhouse.
The immediate aftermath of the bizarre attack was caught on camera:
The Mona Lisa was left shaken but unharmed when a visitor to the Louvre tried to smash the glass protecting the world's most famous painting, before smearing cream across its surface in an apparent climate-related publicity stunt https://t.co/4ZrGg0tXSK pic.twitter.com/56eXIGJf3h
— Reuters (@Reuters) May 30, 2022
This is the third known attack on Da Vinci’s masterpiece. For unknown reasons, a vandal used acid to damage the painting in the 1950s. Then, in 2009, a Russian woman, angered by the French government’s refusal to award her citizenship, pelted the painting with a ceramic cup. The artwork, however, was unarmed, thanks to its top-of-the-line impenetrable casing.