The story begins first, long ago in Florence in 1503 with the portrait of a young wife and mother, Lisa Gherardini by Leonardo da Vinci, who named the painting Mona Lisa.
Five hundred years later, in Paris, France on Monday August 21, 1911 a man who has hidden all night in the Louvre. He had come to the vast museum on Sunday like any other visitor but when the museum was closing he didn't leave. Instead, he hid himself in closet among the easels and paint boxes.
He knew it was possible to hide in the Louvre because a few months earlier, a French journalist who believed the Louvre's security was lacking hid himself overnight in the sarcophagus of an Egyptian king. He published his experience.
The storage closet the thief had hidden in overnight was near the Salon Carre where the most valuable artwork like Titian, Raphael and Leonardo da Vinci was displayed. The man emerged from the closet wearing a white smock like that of the Louvre maintenance workers. The paintings in the Louvre were not locked down as it was assumed no one would dare steal them. However, they were hung in a specific way that required some knowledge as to how to remove them. The thief had this knowledge and quickly removed the painting from the Salon Carre and slipped into the stairwell. There he removed the Mona Lisa from its antique frame and glass covering. Unlike most paintings, the Mona Lisa was painted on three slabs of wood joined together and it was heavy. To hide it, the thief placed the Mona Lisa under his white smock. After struggling to get out of the stairwell's locked door, he escaped into the Paris morning, taking the Mona Lisa and the doorknob.
At first no one realized the Mona Lisa had been stolen. It was considered inconceivable that anyone would attempt this. The workmen who had walked through the Salon Carre only an hour earlier that Monday morning, now saw a blank space on the wall. But they believed the Mona Lisa couldn't be stolen so they did nothing. Even on Tuesday morning when Brigadier Maximilien Alphonse Paupardin, the guard in charge of the Salon Carre, noticed the Mona Lisa missing, he assumed not that it had been stolen, but that the Louvre photographers had it. At this time, the Louvre was photographing its collection and the photographers often removed and returned paintings without telling anyone.
Louis Beroud, a painter who enjoyed painting the copyists as they worked in the Louvre, would be the man who discovered the Mona Lisa was missing. Beroud arrived at the Louvre with the intention of painting a girl working at the Mona Lisa. He was told by Brigadier Paupardin that the painting was being photographed. However, when the painting didn't show up, Beroud became impatient and asked Paupardin to find out when the Mona Lisa would return to the Salon Carre. But when Paupardin spoke to the photographers in the Louvre studio, they were puzzled and did not know what he was talking about.
With Theophile Homolle, the director of the Louvre in Mexico, a panicked Paupardin informed the curator of Egyptian antiquities, Georges Benedite. However, Benedite believed the Mona Lisa was simply somewhere in the Louvre. A search did not find the painting and Georges Benedite was forced to call in the Paris police. Soon all of Paris knew the Mona Lisa was gone. What was the heist of the century would capture the attention of Parisians, French citizens and the world for months and remain unsolved for two years.
Discussion
The Mona Lisa Vanishes is "...a story about how a strange, small portrait became the most famous painting in history...about a shocking theft and a bizarre recovery." But as Nicholas Day aptly demonstrates, "...it is also the story of another way of looking at the world --clearly, plainly, without assumptions or expectations." - the way the painting's creator, Leonardo da Vinci did. This is in contrast to the way the French police viewed their world, and therefore how they investigated the theft of the Mona Lisa.
After introducing the theft of the Mona Lisa, Day takes his readers back into the past, to the story of how the Mona Lisa came to be painted. It is a story that begins with Leonardo da Vinci, born at the height of the Renaissance in 1452, in Vinci. Leonardo is sent to apprentice with Andrea del Verrocchio, a Florentine painter and sculptor whom he soon surpasses in ability. His angel in the painting, The Baptism of Christ was so sublime that Verrocchio quit painting. Leonardo develops a new technique called sfumato in which the artist blends objects and people rather than outlining them in paintings. Unfortunately, Leonardo is often unable to finish works he is commissioned. He eventually would receive the commission to paint Lisa Gherardini, the wife of Francesco Del Giocondo, a successful silk merchant and trader. His problem is that Leonardo is not just a painter but an observer of the world.
From entries in his notebooks, it is evident that he is obsessed with the world around him. His mind is on fire with questions and the quest to find answers through observation and study. This information is not necessary for his art, but this mindset means it is almost impossible to finish the commissions he receives, including the Mona Lisa. However, "...it means he sees the world without being blinded by what he thinks it is already going to be. He doesn't have assumptions about what something is or what it means. He doesn't leap to conclusions. His highest values are observations and experience..." As Day aptly demonstrates, this is in marked contrast to the way the Paris police proceed in their attempt to recover the Mona Lisa.
Interwoven with the story of Leonardo, his life and his painting, is the story of the Paris police's inability to solve the theft and recover the Mona Lisa. Solving crimes is new to police work in the early twentieth century. Louis Lepine, head of the Paris police had begun standardizing police procedures. Helping him was Alphonse Bertillon, a pioneer in the new field of forensics. Bertillon, a temperamental man had developed a method of identifying someone using body measurements - known as anthropometry. His system, used throughout the world, was difficult to implement consistently. A newer technique of fingerprinting to identify a person was just coming into practice. Bertillon had two important leads in the Mona Lisa heist: a fingerprint lifted from the glass pane of the painting, and the knowledge that the thief likely worked in the Louvre.
However, unlike Leonardo da Vinci, Lepine and Bertillon did not have an open mind, instead working on assumptions. "It was the opposite of observation, the opposite of how Leonardo would have wanted the Mona Lisa theft investigated. Unlike Leonardo, Bertillon and Lepine didn't start with the world. They started with what they assumed the world to be." Lepine assumed that because the crime was not a bloody, violent one, it meant that the heist was the work of a "superior class of thief." Lepine was looking for either a professional gang or a consummate professional thief like Adam Worth. One theory held that a rich American had paid a professional thief to steal the Mona Lisa. In 1911, many Americans who had made their wealth during the Guilded Age were eager to showcase that new wealth and to do so they purchased the art of famous painters from Europe. It was because they worked from assumptions and theories like this, rather than observations, that Lepine and Bertillon were unable to solve the heist.
The Mona Lisa Vanishes is not just a story about the theft of the Mona Lisa, but a biography of the the great Renaissance master, Leonardo da Vinci. Day also explores the world of the high Renaissance, while contrasting it with society and the art world in the early twentieth century. Readers will also learn how the Mona Lisa heist changed the public's perception of art and artists .Day's account is informative and definitely engaging, as he weaves his narrative back and forth between Leonardo's life leading to the painting of the Mona Lisa and the desperate attempts to solve the heist in the twentieth century.
There are black and white oil on paper illustrations that will appeal to younger readers. However, inclusion of photographs, for example the Mona Lisa and the Louvre, of Pablo Picasso, Alphonse Bertillon and Vincenzo Peruggia would have added significantly to Day's telling. Other times, an image of a painting being discussed would have been very helpful. For example, Day writes about Pablo Picasso's painting, Les Demoiselles d'Avignon and how this painting changed art, beginning a new movement in modern art. Without an image to consider, readers are left to imagine what Day is explaining. A map of Italy and France, showing the location of Florence and the Louvre
Day does include an extensive list of sources at the back, confirming what readers will most definitely already know, that The Mona Lisa Vanishes is a well-researched book about a heist that is largely forgotten outside the art world. Highly recommended for readers of all ages.
Book Details:
The Mona Lisa Vanishes by Nicholas Day
New York: Random House Studio 2023
278 pp.
New York: Random House Studio 2023
278 pp.
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