Hi °C | Lo °C ONE of France's most iconic paintings has been vandalised by a woman who scrawled a mysterious combination of letters and numbers related to 9/11 conspiracy theories across the canvas, before being tackled by security.
The unnamed 28-year-old woman used a black marker to write on Eugene Delacroix's painting, 'Liberty Leading the People', on Thursday evening.
The work, which portrays a bare-breasted woman at the head of a revolutionary charge, is the star exhibit in a northern subsidiary of the Louvre which opened in December in Lens in the Pas de Calais.
The painting was not permanently damaged.
The woman wrote 'AE911' on the bottom right-hand corner of the painting before she was challenged by a security guard and a visitor.
A Louvre conservation expert cleaned off the writing yesterday and the painting will be on show to the public once again this morning.
'AE911Truth' is the name of a website for Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth, a group which claims that the official version of the terrorist attacks on Manhattan and Washington on September 11, 2001, is a cover-up.
The 10-inch long scribble was placed just under the image of a flat-capped boy taking part in a charge on a barricade during the 1830 revolution in Paris.
Delacroix's painting, dating from that year, was one of the starting points for Victor Hugo's novel 'Les Miserables', published in 1862.
The boy in the flat cap was the direct inspiration for Gavroche, a spirited but finally doomed street child in the novel and in its musical stage and movie adaptation spin-offs.
Louvre officials said that the writing was "superficial" and had been cleaned off in less than two hours by a restorer without damaging the original 187-year-old brush-strokes.
The public prosecutor for the Lens area said: "We don't know yet whether this was someone acting on an impulse or someone who was making some kind of political point." The woman was still in custody yesterday but has not been named.
Anne-Laure Beatrix, the Louvre's head of communications, said: "The painting is whole and has not been damaged in the least.
"The writing was superficial and remained on the varnish without damaging the painting itself."
Irish Independent
