After two months of work, Leonardo da Vinci's painting is once again facing the biggest artwork in the museum: The Wedding of Cana de Veronese. The recent renovations were the largest renovation campaign since the “Grand Louvre” project which saw the iconic pyramid being added to the ancient building.

In addition to repainting the walls midnight blue to better complement the Mona Lisa, the renovations included a new vitrine (the glass display case that encloses the oil on wood painting). According to Vincent Delieuvin, curator of 16th-century Italian art at the museum, glass technology has improved significantly in recent years and the painting’s previous 15-year old bullet-proof glass no longer gave the best possible viewing experience. “Today, the Mona Lisa is behind extremely transparent glass, which really gives the impression of being very close to the painting,” Delieuvin said in an interview.

The painting was originally encased after it was damaged by a visitor who poured acid on it in the early 1950s. Since then, there have been several other unsuccessful attempts at vandalising the painting. In 1956, a visitor to the museum pelted the Mona Lisa with a rock, and the bulletproof glass repelled attacks with spray paint in 1974 and a coffee cup in 2009.

The Louvre is opening an exhibition celebrating the works of Leonardo da Vinci later this month to mark the 500th anniversary of his death, but the Mona Lisa will stay in the Salle des États rather than join the exhibition. A particularly fragile work, the painting can no longer travel outside the Louvre. Even within the Louvre, the work is moved only on rare occasions: It was transferred to the Grande Galerie between 1992 and 1995 to accommodate changes to museum spaces, and to the Salle Rosa between 2001 and 2005, during the previous renovation campaign of the Salle des États.

However, the museum is including a virtual reality Mona Lisa tour, which aims to be “a more intimate encounter”, for those visitors who don’t want to fight the crowds to look her in the eye. The VR tour will be housed in a small gallery room near the main Leonardo exhibition and will also fly visitors over a valley and jagged hills aboard a wing-flapping glider sketched by da Vinci.

In fact, overcrowding in front of the Mona Lisa has become such a problem that officials at the Louvre are introducing timed-entry tickets. The museum has made online reservation compulsory for the Leonardo da Vinci exhibition.

The public preoccupation with the Mona Lisa wasn’t always there, though. In the art world, the painting had always been an acknowledged masterpiece, but it wasn't until it was stolen in the summer of 1911 that it captured the attention of the general public. Newspapers spread the story of the crime worldwide, and when the painting finally returned to the Louvre two years later, practically the whole world was cheering to judge by the news headlines of the time. During the investigation, the gendarmes went so far as to question known art dissidents such as Pablo Picasso about the theft, and briefly arrested poet Guillaume Apollinaire, who had once said the painting should be burned.

Since then, she has increased in fame and popularity. According to the Louvre, 70% of all visitors to the museum are there to see the Mona Lisa, with over 10 million people a year making the trip. The addition of a permanent virtual reality tour should alleviate the pressure on the museum’s staff, who staged a walkout in May this year because the throngs of people were “making their jobs impossible”.