Attack of the Mona Lisa

There was an international incident today at the Louvre Museum in France. Perhaps the most famous painting in history was attacked and defaced. A young man disguised as an old woman in a wheelchair complete with a wig and lipstick, threw a piece of cake at the Mona Lisa with near perfect aim. The masterpiece by Da Vinci was covered in icing. Why cake? Your guess is as good as mine but he then proceeded to shout “think of planet Earth!” in what seems to be a somewhat poorly designed act of eco protest. Have a look at the damage. If he was hoping to draw some attention, he at least succeeded in that.

Now before you panic, it seems the art world had anticipated an ambush like this (or more likely a less random act of vandalism) and protected the Mona Lisa with a thick pane of glass, and no lasting damage was done.

Let me ask you a question. If you walked into the Louvre for the first time and saw the Mona Lisa smeared with white vanilla streaks and the bottom half resembling the finger-painting of a toddler, what would you assume about the painter? What conclusions would you draw? Would you have assumed Da Vinci was a hack? Would you have told all your friends not to believe the hype? Would you blame him for the vandalism?

I’m going to go out on a limb and assume you wouldn’t. No one would removed this renaissance master from the history books simply because someone else defaced his artwork. It is clear that there was something truly beautiful, created my a legendary artist, that was marred by someone else and it in no way reflects on the character of it’s creator.

Why then do we do we use a different criteria for God? Many people can’t see the hand of an Almighty Creator in the canvas of creation because they see the effects of pain and suffering. They assume that God must not have painted well because the Earth is so very imperfect, or that it’s a sign there is no God at all. But far more convincing is the explanation that the greatest artist of all painted a masterpiece in atoms and molecules, but an enemy sowed sin and destruction in the space between them. This world is beautiful and broken. In that order. It’s why you can be awed by a sunset one day, and running from a hurricane the next. If we can see the hand of a bad actor in the Louvre, why not in the mountains and the sky?