Yes, the Mona Lisa needs cleaning, badly. Yellowed varnish is not hard to remove. Yet they preserve it, as some sort of misguided treasuring of the painting as an artifact. Instead of as a painting. So we go elsewhere to see how the real image is supposed to appear, as intended by the artist.

Leaving a painting filthy is a disservice to the artist and to the viewer.

As long as the painting is stable, there is something to be said for keeping it as undisturbed as possible. Historically, we have had to trade off the risk of bad restorations the desire to see the painting in its full glory.

But these days, couldn't they just x-ray/MRI it and do a digital reconstruction of it? We should be able to have our cake and eat too.

Restoration practices are at their peak. Don't look to the 1700's or 1800's to repeat scare stories of bad restorations. It would go fine, and look vastly improved.

And you want to see it in it's full glory? Go to the Prado, they have one, painted the same day, side by side with the original. The point of the story after all.

Which begs the question, who cares about the nasty one in the Louvre. Ok, leave it rot I guess, we have a better one now.

The whole Mona Lisa thing just saddens me. What if it was painted by someone last year in their garage. Would people still queue up to see it? Art with a capital A just detracts from people just doing stuff and other people enjoying it. The money and mystique is just like NFTs.