She may look a bit po-faced – smug, some have even suggested – but surely that is no excuse for launching a cup at her enigmatic face.
A Russian woman, apparently frustrated at having failed to obtain French nationality, hurled a ceramic cup at the Mona Lisa but failed to leave her mark on Leonardo da Vinci's painting, a spokesman for the Louvre museum, in Paris, has said.
It is not the first time a work of art has been targeted by an aggrieved – or ambitious – individual wanting to take their message to a wider audience.
In 1914, the militant suffragette Mary Richardson attacked Velázquez's Rokeby Venus in London's National Gallery as a protest against the arrest of her fellow suffragette Emmeline Pankhurst.
She entered the gallery and slashed the painting with "a small hatchet that had been concealed in her muff," according to the New York Times, which reported the incident the following day.
Laszlo Toth, a Hungarian-born Australian geologist, attacked Michelangelo's Pietà with a hammer in 1972, crying "I am Jesus Christ, risen from the dead."
In 2006, a French performance artist named Pierre Pinoncelli took a small hammer to Marcel Duchamp's Fountain, calling his action a work of art and a tribute to Duchamp and other Dada artists.
The following year, apparently drunk vandals managed to break into the Musée d'Orsay in Paris, punching a hole in Le Pont d'Argenteuil, by Claude Monet.
And in 2008, a Cambodian woman was made to do community service after kissing a painting by the US artist Cy Twombly at a gallery in southern France, leaving a bright lipstick mark on the canvas.
