In what is becoming a semi-annual event, protesters have again attacked Leonardo da Vinci’s iconic Mona Lisa in a bizarre act of vandalism. Female protesters from Riposte Alimentaire (which translates roughly as “Food Response”) opened a thermos and splattered the world’s most famous piece of art with what appeared to be soup.
Protected by a glass barrier, the artwork wasn’t damaged in the futile attack. The two women — identified by Riposte Alimentaire as Sasha, 24, and Marie-Juliette, 63 — shouted to shocked museumgoers as they stood waiting to be arrested.
“What is more important?” they shouted. “Art or the right to healthy and sustainable food?”
“Your agricultural system is sick. Our farmers are dying at work,” they added.
Riposte Alimentaire explained the bizarre stunt in a series of posts on X.
“2 citizens involved with the new Food Response campaign doused the world-famous “Mona Lisa” painting, exhibited at the Louvre Museum, with soup,” the group posted. “Through their non-violent action, Sasha (24 years old) and Marie-Juliette (63 years old) demand the establishment of Sustainable Food Social Security.”
The group declared France’s food distribution model inefficient and wasteful.
“In France, one in three people skip meals due to lack of means. At the same time, 20% of the food produced is thrown away. Our model stigmatizes the most precarious and does not respect our fundamental right to food.”
Riposte Alimentaire appears to have gotten the idea from a deranged climate activist who pretended to be disabled and smeared cake on the painting in 2022, shouting, “Think of the planet, there are people who are destroying the planet, think about that.”
And, of course, there was a climate-connected angle to the protest as well: “Agriculture is responsible for 21 percent of national greenhouse gas emissions and contributes greatly to the deterioration of our biodiversity and the impoverishment of soils, due to the massive use of inputs,” the group claimed
While Riposte Alimentaire’s stated main purpose for the attack was to bring awareness to what they believe are problems with France’s food distribution network, they are closely linked to climate-protest organizations through their involvement with A22, a network of affiliated climate groups including the anti-fossil-fuel group Just Stop Oil.
Defacing art has become a common attention-getting tactic by Just Stop Oil. Since 2022, the group has attempted to deface several pieces of art, including works by Monet and Van Gogh.
In Just Stop Oil’s view, Da Vinci, Monet, and Van Gogh would be happy that their works are being used to score extremist political points.
“There’s still a place for culture. Art has a lot of power, and all the great artists in the past were radical and forward thinking, and yet that’s not being addressed in the same way in the climate crisis,” Alex De Koning, a Just Stop Oil spokesman told Euronews in 2022. “There are still people who are way more outraged about that action (the soup poured on [the] Van Gogh [painting], which was protected by a glass screen) than the 33 million people in Pakistan being displaced by floods.”
Just Stop Oil praised the work of Riposte Alimentaire in an X post.
After the 2022 attack on the Mona Lisa, you would think that the Louvre’s security team would have created a better way of protecting the priceless painting.
Ironically, the attack protesting France’s food and agricultural system occurred as French farmers gathered in Paris to protest excessive government climate measures, which are making farmers’ lives even harder.
