Chambord hid the Mona Lisa from 1939
The Louvre closed its doors on August 25, 1939. Three days later the Mona Lisa left Paris.
She travelled in a padded van, among dozens of other masterpieces, bound for Chambord in the Loir-et-Cher. Jacques Jaujard, head of France's national museums, had spent 1938 and 1939 organizing the evacuation of the country's art into châteaux far from the cities and the expected bombing. The whole operation ran in near secrecy and at speed, with convoys moving by night to stay ahead of the advancing front.
Eighty-three depots were used in the scheme.
Chambord became the largest of them.
By June 1944 some four thousand cubic meters of crates filled its halls.
The scale is the point. What made Chambord useful in 1939 was not its architecture but its emptiness: a colossal hunting château begun for François I, standing in its own forest, well away from any target worth bombing.
A permanent exhibition inside the château now recounts those years, and it sits on the route most visitors hurry past on their way up the double-helix staircase to the roof terrace.
Name another building that held four thousand cubic meters of the Louvre. I have looked, and I do not think there is a second one.
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