A Louvre visitor was detained by museum security on Saturday after he attacked the Mona Lisa, throwing a cake at the famous Renaissance painting. According to reports, the man, who used a wig to disguise himself as a woman in a wheelchair rolled to the Da Vinci masterpiece and then suddenly jumped, came to Mona Lisa, and tried to smear the dessert over the painting.
"Think about Earth! There are people who destroy it. All artists think about it. That's why I did it," he cried.
A clip, circulating online, shows a crowd gathering at the site of the incident, with people taking photos of the cake-covered painting.
Luckily, the Da Vinci painting is protected behind reinforced glass, so there was no actual damage done to it. In fact, La Gioconda is one of the most-protected artworks in the world due to previous attacks against it. Back in the 1950s, a man threw sulphuric acid at the masterpiece, trying to destroy it, and another one cast a stone at Mona Lisa, damaging the paint near the elbow; two decades later it was sprayed during an exhibition in Tokyo.