Episode #205- Why the Mona Lisa?

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Have you ever heard of Paris syndrome?

It's a psychological condition that was first named by the Japanese psychiatrist Hiroaki Ota in the late 1980s while he was working in the French capital.

Ota was encountering an increasing number of Japanese tourists whose mental health had been adversely affected by visiting Paris.

In the most extreme cases, this condition could manifest symptoms, including an increased heart rate, anxiety, vomiting, and even hallucinations.

To this day, the Japanese embassy in France reports that on average, about 20 Japanese tourists every year report this strange and distressing experience.

What brings on Paris syndrome?

Well, it seems to be a combination of things.

The most mundane cause seems to be exhaustion.

It's a long trip from Japan to France, and the lack of sleep caused by jet lag can be legitimately disorienting.

This is compounded by a feeling of culture shock.

It perhaps goes without saying that Japanese and French culture are quite different.

Importantly, they have two very different ideas of what is considered polite.

I would argue that the stereotype that Parisians are rude and that French servers are impatient is actually an unfair exaggeration.

But when you consider that in Japan, smoking on the street is considered rude, well, then you might see how Paris street life might come as a shock to uninitiated Japanese.

But the most significant cause of Paris syndrome is an overwhelming feeling of disappointment.

Paris has a romantic reputation the world over, but this seems to be especially acute in Japan.

There, the French capital is presented as being the home of all things fashionable, refined, and delicious.

In Japanese media, Paris can be idealized as the home of everything that is assumed to be good about European culture at large.

It's a place where you'll find yourself, fall in love, and be enriched by the history, art, and architecture that defines the city.

It's supposed to be the greatest city in the world.

When expectations get that impossibly high, disappointment almost becomes inevitable.

The real Paris is a messy, loud, living city.

Honestly, it's my kind of town.

When taken on its own terms, Paris is delightful, but it's far from perfect.

Paris is a real place where real people live.

It's not a fairy tale.

But

if there's a Paris syndrome in miniature, then it has to be the experience of viewing the city's most iconic work of art, the Mona Lisa.

Leonardo da Vinci's 16th century portrait of the Florentine woman Lisa del Giocondo is easily the most famous painting in the entire world.

Easily.

We're talking number one with a bullet.

This has actually been borne out by data.

A poll conducted back in the year 2000 discovered that a staggering 85.8% of respondents named the Mona Lisa as the world's best-known painting.

Second place was Van Gogh's Sunflowers, which garnered 3.6% of the vote, followed by Botticelli's Spring, which was named by 2.1%

of respondents.

Those numbers tell quite a story.

85%

compared to 3%?

My goodness.

When it comes to pure popularity, the Mona Lisa dwarves her competition.

The second and third best-known paintings on the planet are not even in the same solar system as the Mona Lisa.

And yet, the experience of viewing the Mona Lisa is often described as disappointing.

The Louvre, the painting's longtime home, seems to know this.

For decades, the painting wasn't even hung in a way that suggested its significance.

It was just one of many paintings in the room known as the Salon Caré.

Then, in 1966, in recognition of the painting's growing fame and the fact that more and more visitors were coming to the Louvre specifically to see the Mona Lisa, the painting was moved to the larger Salle des Etat.

But even then, it seemed like the painting wasn't quite popping the way that it needed to.

So, in 2005, the Salle de Etat was completely redesigned to better showcase the Mona Lisa.

Interestingly, this renovation was largely funded by the Japanese television network Nippon TV.

I can't help but find it fascinating that a Japanese media company was instrumental in quite literally putting the Mona Lisa on a higher pedestal.

The redesigned room included a large central wall on which only one painting would be hung behind a specially designed bulletproof non-reflective glass.

This would be the new place of honor for the Mona Lisa.

But all this effort still didn't seem to solve the problem of visitors being underwhelmed.

In 2019, the Salle de Etat was painted a dark blue color to better emphasize the subtle palette being used in Leonardo's painting.

Did it help?

Well, last year the Louvre had to cap its attendance at 30,000 people daily in hopes of alleviating the traffic jam in front of the Mona Lisa.

And yet, enough of those visitors came away feeling non-plussed that the curators are now planning on moving the masterpiece yet again.

Just a few months before this recording, in April of 2024, the Louvre's director and curator both gave interviews discussing the problem with the way the Mona Lisa is currently being exhibited.

Chief curator Vincent Delouvin told the French newspaper Le Figarot that the Salle de Etat is, quote, a large room and the Mona Lisa is at the back behind its security glass.

So at first glance, it looks like a postage stamp.

End quote.

This sentiment was echoed by the director of the Louvre, Laurent Decall, who told W Magazine, quote, We don't welcome visitors very well in this room, so we feel we're not doing our job properly.

Moving the Mona Lisa to a separate room could put an end to public disappointment.

End quote.

I wonder if Director Decar is right.

Is the only thing preventing people from fully appreciating the Mona Lisa, the room in which it's displayed?

If people can see the Mona Lisa in just the right way, will they suddenly get it?

I'm not sure.

My suspicion is that the reason people are disappointed by the Mona Lisa is that they don't know why it's so famous.

The average average visitor to the Louvre is coming to the museum after having seen millions of pictures, recreations, spoofs, and homages to the Mona Lisa.

We

understand it as a meme.

It's a painting that has gained significance by virtue of its repetition in our culture.

It's become a visual shorthand for masterpiece.

But as the renowned street artist Shepherd Fairey has been demonstrating for years, something can be made iconic just through sheer force of repetition.

Has the Mona Lisa become like a Kardashian?

Is she famous for being famous?

Or is there some value added here?

Is there something about this work of art that is truly special and warrants this unique type of adulation?

On the busiest days, it can take upwards of two hours to get into the Louvre, and that's not counting the long line one must now endure specifically to see the Mona Lisa.

After waiting that long, many visitors have a hard time perceiving that added value.

So we have to ask: why the Mona Lisa?

Why is this painting the one we continue to place on an ever more ornate pedestal?

What should we see when we look at her, allegedly, enigmatic smile?

What are all the disappointed visitors at the Louvre missing?

Is there a there?

Or does the fame of the Mona Lisa have little to do with its value as a piece of Renaissance portraiture?

What else can make a painting famous if not the quality of the painting?

Some have argued that the Mona Lisa is only famous because she was stolen.

In 1911, the portrait disappeared from the Louvre.

The crime baffled French police and made headlines around the world.

The media frenzy that accompanied the painting's disappearance and eventual recovery made the Mona Lisa the most talked-about painting of the young century.

When we celebrate the Mona Lisa, are we actually just celebrating one of history's most audacious art heists?

Let's get into it today on our fake history.

Episode number 205, Why the Mona Lisa?

Hello, and welcome to Our Fake History.

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This week, we aren't so much busting a historical myth as we are exploring how one particular object attained a mythic aura.

I am referring, of course, to Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa, or, as she is known in France, La Joconde.

That title is a punning reference to the painting's alleged subject, the Florentine noblewoman Lisa del Giacondo.

The French love for a double entende is so well known that we use their word for double meaning.

In this case, the Italian name Jocondo comes from the same root as jocande, meaning happy, jovial, or good-natured.

It's almost too perfect that the world's most famous smiling face was painted on a woman whose last name easily becomes the Jocan One.

But this is just one of the many fun coincidences, happy accidents, and strange happenings that have made the Mona Lisa the most famous painting in the world.

Today on the show, I want to do my best to explain how and why this happened.

Why has this one painting become the painting?

There are few things as subjective as assessing the quality of a work of art.

Whether we recognize it or not, each of us are armed with a very different set of aesthetic criteria.

Some of these criteria have been suggested to us by our culture or our education.

Others have been forged in the fire of identity creation as we have accepted or rejected things depending on how they mesh with our sense of self.

Still, others can't be explained.

Sometimes things just hit right.

As the cliché goes, there is no accounting for taste.

And yet, we have this canon of Western masterpieces that have been held up as definitionally great works of art.

Usually, these works have some kind of historical significance.

They may be strong examples of a particular style or movement in the art world.

Sometimes they use a technique that goes on to be influential.

Other great works are significant because they make a political point.

Other works seem to capture something about a place, a time, or a group identity.

Now, historical context can sometimes be useful in coming to a deeper appreciation of a particular work, but in my experience, no amount of context can make you like something.

Now, with that said, there have been some canonical masterpieces that really hit me when I saw them in person.

Michelangelo's David kind of blew my mind.

Despite having seen a million pictures of the David, there's something about that sculpture that can't really be captured by a photograph.

It was bigger than I imagined and more alive.

I had a similar experience standing in front of Hieronymus Bosch's famous triptych known as the Garden of Earthly Delights.

In person, that painting has a nearly psychedelic quality that I don't think any photo has properly captured.

Recently, my wife and I had a chance to return to Paris, and we spent a good chunk of our trip checking out the art museums.

During our visit to the Musée d'Orsay, I found myself taken by the paintings of Renoir, an artist whose work had never really grabbed me until I saw it in person.

We also spent a day at the Louvre, and for the second time in my life, I took in the Mona Lisa.

When visiting the Mona Lisa in 2024, the thing that strikes you most is the crowd.

My wife and I were at the Louvre on a Wednesday in early February, arguably the least busy time that one can visit the Louvre.

And still, when you enter the Salle des Etat, you you are confronted with a throng of bodies trying to get close to the Da Vinci.

And, of course, because this was 2024, most of the crowd was just trying to elbow their way to a place where they could snap an Instagram-worthy selfie with the world's most famous painting.

The push of the crowd isn't really conducive to taking in the art in any real way.

The Louvre would certainly never admit this, but the feeling you get when you're close to the Mona Lisa is that you should take your picture and move on.

When I saw the Mona Lisa, all I really saw was the strange spectacle it created.

But perhaps this is appropriate given what the Mona Lisa has become in our culture.

What we see now at the Louvre could be understood as a manifestation of a fear that many art lovers started expressing in the early 20th century.

In 1907, a woman named Valentine Contrelle came to the Louvre with a pair of scissors and slashed a painting known as the Sistine Chapel.

Now, Contrelle didn't have a problem with that particular painting.

She was trying to make a point about poverty in France at the time.

She would later say in an official statement, quote, It is a shame to see so much money invested in dead things like those at the Louvre Louvre collection when so many poor devils like myself starve because they cannot find work.

I have just spoiled a picture at the Louvre in order to be arrested.

⁇ End quote.

But weirdly enough, Contrelle soon discovered that getting arrested was the hard part of this.

Security was so bad at the Louvre at the time that no one who worked at the museum noticed when she defaced the painting.

She actually had to seek out a guard and turn herself in.

Even then, the guard did not believe that she had seriously slashed a painting.

She apparently had to drag the guard back to the scene of the crime to show him exactly what she'd done.

Now, obviously, this was very distressing for the Louvre.

So the powers at B made the fateful decision to put a handful of the museum's most precious paintings behind panes of glass.

This caused an uproar among artists, art critics, and other members of the French public, for whom the Parisian art collections were an important source of civic pride.

It was argued that the protective panes of glass would create a divide between the paintings and their audience.

The audience would no longer be able to appreciate these works as they were intended.

It would be harder to perceive their power.

Fakes could be more easily substituted behind a tricky pane of glass.

Most distressing of all was the fact that these panes of glass were reflective.

Now, when visitors to the Louvre gazed upon these masterpieces, they would just see themselves gazing back.

To hammer this point home, one Parisian made a show out of bringing a straight razor into the Louvre.

But instead of slashing a painting, he set himself up in front of the glass protecting a famous Rembrandt and proceeded to shave his face.

This little stunt inspired the artist Louis Beroux to incorporate a similar message into a painting that he was planning.

This was 1911, and at the time, the Louvre was not hosting 30,000 daily visitors.

The museum was considerably more sleepy.

Many of the regulars at the museum were artists known as copyists who would set up in front of various masterpieces and would do their best to paint close approximations of what was on the wall.

Most of the copyists were amateurs, and many were women, for whom copying was considered a respectable hobby at the time.

The Louvre even got a reputation among pickup artists as a great place to meet single ladies.

Others were professional artists who knew they could fetch a good price for a reasonable copy.

The Louvre even had a special room where these copyists could store their easels and other painting supplies.

Louis Berou created work that was sort of an elevated version of this.

He would go to the Louvre and he would paint people painting the paintings.

His whole artistic project was about commenting on how famous art was observed and the many layers of subjectivity that can come between art and an audience.

So, of course, he was going to create a piece of art that referenced the controversial glass.

So, he planned to do a painting of a woman fixing her hair in the reflection of the glass covering the Mona Lisa.

I can only imagine what Baru would have thought about a crowd of people taking selfies in front of that painting today.

So on one August morning, Baroux made all the preparations, arranged to have a model present, and headed over to the Louvre.

But when he arrived in the Salle Carré, he discovered that the Mona Lisa was not where she should be.

In fact, the first person to notice that the Mona Lisa was missing wasn't a guard, nor were they a curator.

It was Louis Baru, a museum visitor.

So Barou then asked a guard where the Mona Lisa had gone.

The guard shrugged and guessed that it must have been taken to the Louvre photography studio by the photographers.

In 1911, photographic technology had gotten to the point where the Louvre thought it was prudent to photograph every painting in the museum.

Now this was obviously a massive project and these photographers basically had the run of the place.

If a Louvre photographer needed a painting, they were not expected to ask permission.

They just hauled it off the wall and took it to the in-house photography studio.

So if a painting was missing from the wall, there was a good chance that the photographers had it.

So Louis Beroux waited.

Hours went by.

It was starting to look like the whole day was going to be a wash.

So he went back to the security guard and asked if he could check with the photographers how long they were going to need the Mona Lisa.

If it was going to be a while, Baru didn't want to waste another day.

So the guard headed down to the photography studio and asked about the Mona Lisa.

But the photographers didn't know what he was talking about.

They didn't have the Da Vinci.

This kicked off a frantic search.

Surely the Mona Lisa had to be in the Louvre somewhere, right, guys?

Just like in the case of Valentin Cortel, the authorities at the Louvre simply could not believe that someone would be so audacious as to commit a crime against art.

But soon it became clear that the Mona Lisa was gone.

Someone had stolen her right off of the wall.

This audacious heist and the ensuing hunt to recover the purloined masterpiece made the Mona Lisa global news.

This was the start of a new chapter in the existence of the Mona Lisa.

There's no doubt that the theft made the Mona Lisa more famous than ever.

The harder question to answer is just how famous was the portrait before the theft?

So let's go back and and explore the history of the Mona Lisa's creation and her place in the art world over the generations.

Then let's dive into the heist and see how that previously unimaginable crime changed our relationship with the painting.

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When researching the theft of the Mona Lisa in 1911, you can come across a narrative that creeps into some of the articles written for a more popular audience.

You will sometimes read that the Mona Lisa was a relatively obscure painting until it was stolen.

In 2011, on the centenary of the theft, NPR published an article titled The Theft That Made the Mona Mona Lisa a Masterpiece.

And two years later, CNN ran a piece titled Mona Lisa, The Theft That Created a Legend.

Now, as often happens, these headlines don't fully reflect the nuance present in the actual articles.

But these articles, among others, lean into the idea that the Mona Lisa was a little known painting in the Louvre collection until its theft made it a celebrity.

Now, that narrative is very tempting, especially for those of us who make podcasts and are looking for hooks, because, you know, that's a good hook.

And there is some truth to that idea.

But as always, a closer look reveals a more complicated story.

The tricky thing about tracing the history of the Mona Lisa is that so little is known about its creation.

This is despite the fact that the Mona Lisa was created by one of history's most celebrated artists and polymaths, Leonardo da Vinci.

Born in Florence in 1452, Leonardo's artistic achievements, visionary scientific ideas, and legendary curiosity have earned him a historical reputation as the archetypal Renaissance man.

Now, obviously, there's a lot to say about Leonardo da Vinci, and there are a ton of historical myths to bust about his life and art.

That is a story that I promise to get to one day, but for today we're going to keep our sights trained on the Mona Lisa, lest we fall down a very tempting da Vinci rabbit hole.

Now, Luckily for historians, Leonardo da Vinci left behind extensive notebooks, and much of his life was fairly well documented, especially for someone living in the late 15th and early 16th centuries.

But, weirdly, he never wrote anything about the Mona Lisa, nor did he leave behind any sketches or preliminary work, which we do have for other well-known works of his.

Instead, all we have to go on are a handful of sometimes confused historical sources.

One of the earliest and for a long time best known accounts of the Mona Lisa's creation comes from a book first published in 1550 called The Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects.

This was a series of biographies written by the Florentine Giorgio Vasari, meant to celebrate the lives of famous artists who had been produced by his city a generation earlier.

Vasari was writing a few decades after Leonardo's death, so he wasn't exactly a contemporary, but for a long time, his version of the Mona Lisa's creation was the only one we had.

Vasari claimed that the Mona Lisa was commissioned sometime around 1503, when Leonardo would have been 51 years old and already firmly established as one of northern Italy's great artists.

The commission came from a Florentine silk merchant named Francesco Del Giocondo.

He requested that Leonardo paint a portrait of his wife Lisa, born Lisa Garadini.

Now, as I said, by that time Leonardo was widely regarded as one of the Florentine greats.

But he had a terrible reputation for not completing his commissions.

There is a long list of unfinished and half-started Leonardo projects.

In fact, the Mona Lisa that currently hangs in the Louvre may be one of those unfinished projects.

Now, interestingly, Leonardo had turned down commissions from other patrons far more august than Francesco Giacondo.

So, why did he take this one?

The short answer is that we don't know.

The best guess is that he needed the money.

The romantic guess is that he saw some ineffable mystery in the beautiful Lisa Gerardini.

I'm inclined to the more practical explanation.

However, this painting would linger with Leonardo.

He would tinker with the Mona Lisa, or at least a version of the Mona Lisa, for the remaining 16 years of his life.

Now, Vasari's account of the painting makes it clear that by the mid-16th century, the Mona Lisa was a well-known and well-regarded painting, at least by literate art lovers.

Vasari was effusive in his praise, saying, quote, anyone wishing to see the degree to which art could imitate nature could readily perceive this from the Mona Lisa's head.

since therein are counterfeited all those tiny things that with subtlety are able to be painted.

⁇ End quote.

Vasari then goes on to praise the moistness of the figure's eyes, the shape of the mouth, and the delicacy of the Mona Lisa's hands.

He even tells us that, quote, the nose with its beautiful nostrils, rosy and tender, appeared to be alive, end quote.

So in the first book about the great artists of what would later be known as the Renaissance, there's a long passage about how great the Mona Lisa is.

But Vasari was slightly confused when it came to the timeline of this painting's creation.

These discrepancies have led many art historians over the years to claim that the subject of the painting was not, in fact, Lisa Giacondo.

Many other rich Italian women have been suggested as being the real Mona Lisa.

But in recent years, this debate seems to have been settled, with most experts now agreeing that Lisa was the Mona Lisa.

These days, debate about the painting centers around a newer hypothesis.

You see, Vasari claimed that after Leonardo, quote, had lingered over it for four years, he left the Mona Lisa unfinished, and the work is today in the possession of King Francis of France at Fontainebleau.

⁇

It is true that the Mona Lisa that we now see in the Louvre at one time belonged to King Francis I,

but that painting may have actually been a second or potentially third iteration of the original Mona Lisa.

Professor Jean-Pierre Ybou has argued that while it was common for Leonardo's commissions to remain unfinished, this particular commission would have been strange not to deliver, given that it was a portrait of a man's wife.

Ibu has suggested that Vasari was correct when he said that the first version of the Mona Lisa took Leonardo four years to complete.

Leonardo then likely had an assistant quickly finish that painting up and deliver it to the Giacondos before Leonardo left Florence for Milan in 1507.

However, the guess is that Leonardo then used his sketches of that original portrait as the basis for a later, more carefully executed and idealized painting that we know today as the Mona Lisa.

In his book The Three Mona Lisas, art historian Rab Hatfield uses x-rays of La Jaconde to help support his argument that the famous Mona Lisa is actually Leonardo's third attempt at the subject.

Now, to be clear, this is still just a hypothesis, but there seems to be some support growing for the three Mona Lisa's idea.

Anyway, in 1516, the aging Leonardo was invited by King Francis I of France to relocate to his kingdom and take up the role of official court painter.

Although his job was fairly ill-defined, King Francis was enamored with Leonardo and called him, quote, a philosopher and a wizard, end quote.

He granted Leonardo a comfortable house at Claude Lusset on the condition that the artist would come to the French court and would just, you know, be Leonardo da Vinci.

When da Vinci went to France, he brought with him the Mona Lisa, potentially the third Mona Lisa.

Some experts believe that he never completely finished the painting while he was there.

Still, upon his death, we're told that King Francis paid Leonardo's heir 4,000 gold coins for the Mona Lisa.

Now, it's not exactly clear how and when this exchange went down, but the King of France identified the Mona Lisa as one of his favorite Leonardo paintings.

So it obviously had a pretty high-profile admirer right away.

We're told that for years the Mona Lisa hung in the equivalent of the bathroom in the Fontainebleau Palace, although that is somewhat disputed.

Over a century later, the Sun King himself, Louis XIV, had the painting moved to the newly constructed Palace of Versailles, where it was displayed until the coming of the French Revolution.

But before the Mona Lisa became only accessible to the French kings and their guests, a handful of influential artists got a chance to see the painting while it was still a work in progress.

The most significant of these artists had to be the celebrated master Raphael.

We know that around 1513, Raphael visited with Leonardo and got a chance to look at the still unfinished Mona Lisa.

He sketched the painting and then eventually incorporated elements of it into some of his own portraits.

The most famous of these portraits was that of the courtier Baldassarre Castiglione, who would go on to be the famous author of the high society how-to manual, The Book of the Courtier.

If you look at the portrait, you'll notice that Castiglione is posed much in the same way as the Mona Lisa.

This pose is known as contraposto, and it became so popular in composition that there's a good chance that a photographer who took one of your school pictures made you sit in this pose.

You know, shoulders to the side, head facing the camera, you remember.

The point is, despite the fact that the Mona Lisa was sequestered away in various French palaces for nearly 280 years, it still managed to have an influence on European art.

In those years, copying paintings was very common and even encouraged by the owners of famous works of art, as it made those works even more famous.

A good copy could even become quite valuable.

The Mona Lisa was copied enough that artists became familiar with her pose, her expression, and Leonardo's distinctive style.

By the 1700s, portraits of seated smiling women would often be categorized as jocons in reference to the best-known seated smiling lady portrait.

But while we're on the topic of the Mona Lisa being imitated, I think it's a good time to discuss what the artistic merits of this painting actually are.

Given the sheer ubiquity of Mona Lisa images and the uncomfortable experience of viewing it in person in the 21st century, it's gotten harder to appreciate what's special about the painting.

And there are some things that are special about it.

First, this painting was meticulously created over the course of 15 years, maybe even longer.

By all accounts, Leonardo used that glacial pace to create something that could only be done slowly.

The painting isn't on a canvas, it's on a piece of wood, poplar to be exact.

This might sound strange, but actually it was fairly common.

What was less common was the use of oil paints.

Now, the Mona Lisa is far from the first oil painting, but Leonardo has been noted as an early master of the medium.

The thing about oil paints was that they dried considerably more slowly than the traditional tempera paints used by European artists.

Oil paints could be built up and layered in a way that earlier paints could not.

Leonardo also used incredibly thin brushes that made the brush strokes basically imperceptible in this painting.

As such, the Mona Lisa conveys considerably more depth than most contemporary portraits.

Not only does the central figure pop out of her strange background, but there's greater depth in the contours of her face.

Not to mention the subtlety of the translucent veil that covers her hair.

You ever noticed that veil before?

Look again.

Secondly, as all you art history students surely know, Leonardo is famous for pioneering a technique known as sfumato, which translates as smoky.

Mona Lisa expert Donald Sassoon explains the effect like this.

Quote, the sfumato technique Leonardo pioneered consisted of building up layers of paint from dark to light, letting the previous one come through, thus achieving through the play of shadow the optical illusion of relief.

End quote.

Leonardo used this technique in many of his paintings.

The Mona Lisa is also not the first example of sfumato.

However, there's a case to be made that it's the best.

The secret to the Mona Lisa's much commented on facial expression has to do with how Leonardo used this technique around the corners of the figure's eyes and mouth.

This allowed him to create an expression that is unique in the world of painting.

When you look directly at the Mona Lisa, her smile seems a little more muted.

The more you look away, the more she seems to be smiling.

This trick is achieved through sfumato, the very special and much copied technique that Leonardo pioneered.

Leonardo also used a coat of white paint as the undercoat that he used to illuminate the face of his subject.

The result is that the Mona Lisa radiates from her poplar canvas.

Then, of course, there's the much commented on Mona Lisa effect.

This is where the Mona Lisa's eyes seem to follow you wherever you are in the room.

Now, it should be noted that the Mona Lisa is not the only painting that has the Mona Lisa effect, but we named it after her for a reason.

Now, of course, I could keep going.

We could talk about how the contra posto pose gives a feeling of movement in the painting.

We could talk about the pyramidal structure of the Mona Lisa.

We could talk about the unusual background in the Mona Lisa.

There are entire books written on the technical mastery on display in this painting.

But hopefully, I've given you a sense of why this painting was well regarded in the first place.

It's not famous for no reason, and that's worth establishing in the 21st century, where it can be hard to see the Mona Lisa with fresh eyes.

There is no doubt that the Mona Lisa is a historically significant painting with an observable influence on European art.

It definitely represents a leap forward in portraiture.

Now, all of that stuff gets you into the Louvre, but none of those things make you the most famous painting in the world.

If I can put it in musical terms, the innovations of Leonardo got the Mona Lisa her record deal.

But just because you have a record deal, it doesn't mean you're going to have a hit.

And it definitely doesn't guarantee that you will become an icon.

So.

How did the Mona Lisa get to that next level?

Well, by the mid-1790s, the French Revolution had swept away France's Bourbon monarchy.

All the property previously held by the French crown became the property of the newly created French Republic.

The Louvre, which had previously been a royal residence, was repurposed as an art museum to which all of France's citizens would have free access.

It also became the home of many famous works of art previously kept at Versailles and other royal palaces.

The king's art collection was now the people's art collection.

Among those pieces marked to be transferred to the Louvre was the Mona Lisa.

But along the way, it caught the eye of the newly ascendant Napoleon Bonaparte.

Before the Mona Lisa could be displayed in the Louvre, Bonaparte had the painting moved to his bedroom in Paris's Tuilerie Palace.

There it stayed until 1804, when Bonaparte was compelled to have the painting moved to the Louvre where it could be displayed publicly.

The fact that Napoleon had been yet another high-profile admirer of the painting certainly did not hurt the prestige of the Mona Lisa.

But believe it or not, when it entered the Louvre, it was not considered the most valuable painting in the collection.

In fact, it wasn't even close.

Now, to be clear, it was still regarded as a masterpiece, and a masterpiece by the great Leonardo da Vinci, no less.

But, you know, the Louvre had a bunch of those.

In 1849, the Louvre had their collection appraised.

That appraisal estimated La Jaconde as having a market value of around 90,000 francs.

Now, that's not nothing when you consider that a nice three-bedroom middle-class home in Paris went for around 50,000 francs at the time.

But it's notable that another Leonardo masterpiece, The Virgin of the Rocks, was appraised at 150,000 francs.

Even more significantly, almost every Raphael painting in the museum's collection was considered more valuable than the Mona Lisa in 1849.

In that appraisal, Raphael's Sainte-Famille was estimated at 600,000 francs.

In paintings of the Salon Carais from the early 1800s, the Mona Lisa can be spotted as just one of many paintings crowding the overstuffed walls of the room.

The Mona Lisa was in an important room, at an important museum, but it was just one of many great works, no more famous than any of her neighbors.

But as the 19th century went on, something started to happen around the Mona Lisa.

The painting had always had admirers, but starting in the 1850s, it attracted a new group of art critics who started to see something new in the Mona Lisa.

In his book, Becoming Mona Lisa, the historian Donald Sassoon argues that chief among these new admirers was the the French author and critic Theophile Gauthier.

Gauthier would eventually become a well-regarded poet and fiction writer, but for most of his life he paid the bills working as a journalist, usually as a theater, art, and book critic.

He wrote about the Mona Lisa many times over his career, and Sassoon has argued that he popularized the idea that the Mona Lisa was an especially mysterious and seductive painting.

In 1867, Gauthier wrote a guide to the Louvre.

In the book, he took his readers through the galleries and waxed poetic about many of the famous paintings on display.

In that book, he made it clear that he believed that the Mona Lisa was one of the museum's most sacred treasures.

His ode to the Mona Lisa reads like some real drippy poetry.

Allow me to quote

Sphinx of beauty who smiles so mysteriously in the frame of Leonardo da Vinci and seems to offer the admiration of centuries an enigma by them not yet solved, an invincible attraction brings us all back to thee.

Oh, indeed, who was not long hours before that head bathed in a twilight of half tints enveloped in transparent gauze, and whose features are melodiously drowned in a violet vapor, appear like the creation of dream through the black gauze of sleep.

That strange being with her glance promising unknown voluptuousness and her expression divinely ironical.

Never has the feminine ideal been invested with forms more deliciously seductive.

Oh man,

you hear that?

That's bananas.

Gauthier's Guide to the Louvre was fairly popular and introduced many to the idea that the Mona Lisa was a painting not to be missed.

And when one encountered the Mona Lisa, they were sure to be entranced by her enigmatic and seductive charm.

Many had commented on the Mona Lisa's smile before, but Gauthier introduced the idea that the smile suggested a mystery that needed to be solved.

In another well-read bit of art criticism that came out later in 1867, Gauthier zeroed in on the magic of the Mona Lisa's smile, writing, quote,

The sinuous serpentine mouth turned up at the corners in a violet penumbra mocks the viewer with such sweetness, grace, and superiority that we feel timid like schoolboys in front of a duchess.

End quote.

This idea really stuck.

The Mona Lisa smile reduces the viewer.

We become schoolboys in front of a duchess.

Donald Sassoon has argued that by the mid-1870s, enough contemporary art critics were echoing Gauthier's praises that the quote-unquote enigma of the Mona Lisa became a Europe-wide myth.

According to Sassoon, quote, Gauthier's construction of the meaning of the Mona Lisa became the dominant one, end quote.

In 1869, a British art critic, Walter Pater, published his own assessment of the Mona Lisa as part of an essay on Leonardo written for the magazine The Fortnightly Review.

This popular essay was then republished a few years later in 1873 in a book called Studies in the History of the Renaissance.

In that essay, Pater poetically muses on the same enigma originally suggested by Gauthier.

Pater writes of the Mona Lisa, quote:

She is older than the rocks among which she sits.

Like the vampire, she has been dead many times and has learned the secrets of the grave, and has been a diver in deep seas, and keeps their fallen day about her, and trafficked for strange webs with eastern merchants, and as Leda was the mother of Helen of Troy, and as Saint Anne the mother of Mary, and all this has been to her but as the sound of lyres and flutes, and lives only in the delicacy with which it has molded the changing linaments and tinged the eyelids and the hands.

Haha, believe it or not, that was all one sentence.

The Victorians really knew how to use a semicolon.

Pater's ode to the Mona Lisa's seductive but vampiric power was incredibly well read in the English-speaking world.

In fact, his essay on Leonardo became required reading in many British classrooms.

That monster sentence I just quoted was actually chosen by Our Fake History's favorite occult magician, W.B.

Yeats, to be presented as the first poem in the 1936 edition of the Oxford Book of Modern Verse.

This is all to say that Pater made sure that every well-schooled Victorian was deeply aware of the majesty and mystery of the Mona Lisa.

So it's clear that by the turn of the 20th century, the cult of the Mona Lisa was on the grow.

The hyperbolic praise of art critics had elevated her from just one of many great Leonardo paintings to arguably the most revered Leonardo painting.

The praise of these critics was also changing how people were engaging with the Mona Lisa.

This was commented on by no less a figure than the great Oscar Wilde.

In his 1891 essay, or rather dialogue, Wilde had one of his interlocutors wonder whether or not, quote, Mr.

Pater has put into the portrait of Mona Lisa something that Leonardo never dreamed of.

He later continues, quote,

Whenever I pass into the cool galleries of the palace of the Louvre and stand before that strange figure, I murmur to myself, She is older than the rocks among which she sits.

Like the vampire, she has been dead many times and learned the secrets of the grave.

End quote.

He ultimately concludes that the criticism has now, strangely, become part of the art, saying, quote, and so the picture becomes more wonderful to us than it really is, and reveals to us a secret of which, in truth, it knows nothing.

End quote.

Yeah,

you have to love Oscar Wilde.

Clearly, by the time we get to 1911, the Mona Lisa was not some obscure painting lost among the vast collection of the Louvre.

It was highly regarded, and in recent decades it had become critically adored.

In fact, it had become so critically adored that Oscar Wilde thought that it was getting hard to appreciate the painting in a way that was untainted by critical opinion.

The Mona Lisa mattered.

By 1891, some even thought that the Mona Lisa Lisa was getting a little overhyped.

But it was still not the most famous painting in the world.

For the Mona Lisa to clinch that undisputed title, it needed to make a very clever career move.

And that was to get kidnapped from the Louvre.

So let's pause here.

And when we return, we'll explore how the theft of the Mona Lisa rocketed it to a new level of fame.

On August 22nd, 1911, when the artist Louis Baru finally convinced the Louvre security guards to start searching for the Mona Lisa, the painting had already been gone for over half a day.

At first, all of the Louvre's curators and directors refused to believe that the painting was stolen.

The Louvre was a labyrinth where things got lost all the time.

Surely La Jocande was still in the museum.

After all, just a few months previously, the director of the museum had given an interview where he had laughed off questions about the Louvre's security by boasting that, quote, you might as well pretend that one could steal the towers of the Cathedral of Notre Dame, end quote.

He would come to regret those words.

After an exhaustive search, the staff had not found the Mona Lisa, although they had recovered the painting's frame and the protective glass that had been squirreled away in a dark corner at the bottom of a stairwell.

They could no longer deny that the painting had been stolen.

The story would not hit the press until August 23rd, but when it did, it caused an absolute sensation.

Le Petit Parisienne, a French newspaper that at the time claimed the world's largest circulation, with 1.4 million copies sold daily, ran the headline, quote, La Jocande disappears from the Musée de Louvre,

along with a a rather large picture of the stolen painting.

Below the headline was the somewhat ironic jab at the Louvre that although the painting was gone, quote, we still have the frame, end quote.

This early article contained a number of elements that would go on to be hallmarks of the reporting on this theft.

For instance, readers were told that, quote, the absolute truth was that there never was a more perfect picture end quote the painting was also presented as an integral piece of french heritage or as le petit parisienne put it quote la jaconde was really ours will we ever see her smile again end quote

in 1911 le petit parisienne was just one of dozens of newspapers based in paris and they all covered the theft with equal verve.

For three weeks, the theft dominated headlines in France and globally, and even after the story fell off the front page, it remained an ongoing story for many months.

In that time, every bit of hyperbolic praise, along with every colorful anecdote about the Mona Lisa, was dredged up.

Many French papers, including Le Petit Parisienne, quoted from Gauthier's essay on the Mona Lisa, especially the line about the viewers being made schoolboys in front of a duchess.

The British papers did much the same, except they pulled their quotes from Pater's effusive essay.

The painting's history with the kings of France and the fact that Napoleon had slept under her gaze were recounted as proof that this theft had robbed France of a truly irreplaceable treasure.

Many papers ran stories that amplified the old myth that Leonardo da Vinci had been in love with the subject of the painting.

The Petit Parisienne even came up with their own myth that the romantic poet Alfred Mousset had once been granted special permission to sleep in the Salon Carais so he could be near the Mona Lisa.

But most significantly, papers around the world regularly ran pictures of the Mona Lisa.

They did this for months.

This was the first time that the vast majority of people had ever seen the painting.

In fact, for most of the newspaper reading public in 1911, this was the first time that they'd ever seen any painting that was kept in the Louvre.

This was the first piece of high art that many had ever been exposed to.

And it was paired with an exciting crime story and descriptions claiming that it was the most perfect picture ever created.

Large reproductions of the painting appeared, sometimes in color, in popular illustrated news magazines.

In France, the magazine L'Ilustration

ran a page-length reproduction of the Mona Lisa, along with a story that Leonardo had secretly been in love with her.

The London Illustrated News ran a double spread spread color picture of the Mona Lisa that folded out center fold style.

Overnight, the Mona Lisa became the most popular subject plastered on postcards sent from Paris.

The burgeoning mass media of the early 20th century allowed the Mona Lisa's face to become as recognizable as any celebrity.

The theft had put her on the front page of newspapers around the world.

The crime also seemed to validate all those critics who claimed that the Mona Lisa was a femme fatale with nearly evil powers of seduction.

She was the kind of girl that could make a good man go bad, and the theft only proved it.

On top of running images of the Mona Lisa, newspapers also ran pictures of where the Mona Lisa should have been.

Both l'Ilistración and the British newspaper The Daily Mirror ran a photo of the Louvre showing the empty spot on the wall where the Mona Lisa had hung before the theft.

This image really struck a chord.

You see, a week after the theft, when the Louvre finally reopened, for the first time in memory, there was a line of people waiting to get into the museum.

Now, in 2024, it's wild to think that a line at the Louvre was at one time an unusual thing.

But all these visitors were at the Louvre to see something

that wasn't technically there.

They had all come to see the empty spot on the wall where the Mona Lisa had once hung.

Now, For me, this seems like an obvious turning point in the fame of the Mona Lisa.

The Mona Lisa was now so famous that people were interested in her vacant spot on the wall.

If you want to argue that the Mona Lisa's fame has little to do with any artistic merit,

this might be exhibit A.

Staring at a blank spot on the wall seems more like a veneration of celebrity than it is a veneration of art.

Fueled by the omnipresent coverage in the papers, the indignant French public demanded justice.

The authorities responded by clamping down at the border, searching every train and every ship heading to sea.

Every lead was followed up, but they had nothing.

They had absolutely no idea who had taken the Mona Lisa.

As the months passed, speculation began to run rampant.

The police and various papers were inundated with useless tips.

It seemed like everyone in Paris knew a suspicious character they were sure stole the Mona Lisa.

At the time, tensions between France and Germany were particularly high.

This was the lead-up to the First World War, after all.

As such, many believed that the thieves had to be Germans working on the orders of the Kaiser himself.

Others guessed that the robbery had been pulled off by a gang of sophisticated international art thieves.

After all, the crime had been so smooth.

Given how hard it would be to sell a painting like the Mona Lisa, some guessed that it had made its way into the private collection of a nefarious millionaire who had orchestrated the whole thing.

Many suspected the American millionaire J.P.

Morgan, a known lover of European art, as the man behind the theft.

But, of course, there was no proof of this.

As months turned into years and the police came no closer to solving the case, many simply accepted that the Mona Lisa was gone for good.

Most of the world moved on.

In fact, If the Mona Lisa had stayed lost, there's a good chance that she would have been completely forgotten.

The momentum of her growing fame would have petered out.

Donald Sassoon points out that by 1913, the British were clearly over it, at least judging by that year's charity ball at the Royal Albert Hall.

Guests were asked to come dressed as world-famous paintings, and not a single person came as the Mona Lisa.

But then, on November 29th, 1913, a Florentine antiques dealer named Alfredo Gueri received an unusual letter from a stranger identifying himself only as Leonardo.

This stranger claimed that he had the Mona Lisa and that he wished to return it to Italy for patriotic reasons.

All he asked was for a paltry 500,000 lira to cover his expenses.

Gary happened to be friends with the head curator of Florence's famous Uffizi Art Museum, Giovanni Poggi.

So he showed Poggi the letter and asked him what he should do.

Pogi said, write Leonardo back and tell him you want to see the Mona Lisa.

So Gary did exactly that, and it was agreed that this man would come to Florence with the painting.

In a few weeks, this mysterious gentleman had arrived in the northern Italian city and had set himself up in a small, unassuming hotel.

It was arranged that Alfredo Garry would come to the hotel with Giovanni Poggi, who he transparently identified as the curator of the Uffizi.

There, they would see the alleged Mona Lisa.

Now, amazingly, this mystery man agreed.

When Gary and Pogy arrived at the hotel, they were greeted by a short, unassuming Italian fellow.

He opened up his large traveler's trunk, removed a false bottom, and revealed the Mona Lisa.

Pogi would later claim that he knew it was the genuine article the moment he saw it.

A quick inspection also revealed that on the back of the painting was the distinctive Louvre inventory stamp with the correct inventory number.

This was it, but Gary and Poggi played it cool.

They said they still weren't sure about this alleged Mona Lisa and asked if they could take the painting with them back to the Uffizi, where they could examine it more closely.

Amazingly, once again, this Leonardo said, yeah, sure, that's fine.

The two Florentines then walked out of the hotel with the Mona Lisa.

And in a weird twist, the two men were actually stopped at the door by a concierge who accused them of stealing art from the hotel.

They were then in the weird position of having to prove that they were not actually stealing any hotel art while simultaneously not revealing that the painting that they did have was the freaking Mona Lisa.

In yet another ironic twist, this two-bit Florentine hotel seemed to be better at protecting its art than the Louvre.

Eventually, they were able to talk their way past the concierge and they were allowed to leave.

Once the painting was safely back at the Uffizi, Gary and Poggy phoned the police.

In no time, officers were at the hotel where they found the world's most wanted art thief just sitting in his room.

Even after he had given the world's best-known piece of stolen property to the curator of the Uffizi, he still thought, ah, might as well sit tight.

The man they apprehended, this Leonardo, was actually one Vincenzo Perugia.

Perugia in no way fit the stereotype of the person assumed to have stolen the Mona Lisa.

He was not some sophisticated cat burglar working for an American millionaire.

Perugia was a down-on-his-luck working man originally from a small village in northern Italy.

In 1908, he moved to Paris looking for work and found it painting houses and doing other contracting jobs.

One of these jobs was working at the Louvre.

One of the small contracting companies he would sometimes do work for was given the job of installing the newly commissioned glass panes on a number of high-profile paintings, including the Mona Lisa.

It all comes back to the choice to put glass in front of the paintings at the Louvre.

In yet another delicious twist of irony, the installation of the glass, the very thing that was supposed to protect the Mona Lisa, led directly to its theft.

While he was working at the Louvre, Perugia saw firsthand how lax the security was.

No one seemed to blink as the workmen in their distinctive white smocks removed paintings from the wall at their leisure.

Perugia also learned the very specific technique used to remove the paintings from their hooks.

This was the only real security measure that they had at the Louvre.

If you didn't know the right way to remove the paintings, it would be a clumsy and time-consuming affair.

But Perugia learned the move.

After completing his work at the Louvre, Perugia plotted for a number of months.

He returned to the museum in late August, a time when he knew the museum would be virtually deserted.

He wore his white workman's smock.

And just like last time, no one asked him any questions as he moved about the museum after closing.

He then went to a large closet that he knew was used by the Louvre's many copyists to keep their easels and paints, and there he hid.

He patiently stayed in that closet till about 2 a.m.

in the morning.

Then he slipped out, headed for the salon caré, quickly removed the Mona Lisa from the wall, and hid it under his smock.

He then headed for the least conspicuous exit he could find.

Finding the frame and glass cumbersome, along the way, he stopped in a stairwell, removed the painting, and stashed the frame in a dark corner.

Once outside of the museum, he walked briskly back to the boarding house where he lived and stashed the Mona Lisa in a trunk with a false bottom.

And there it stayed for the next two years.

So that was how Perugia stole the Mona Lisa.

The The bigger question was, why did he steal the painting?

Well, after his arrest, Perugia claimed that while he was working at the Louvre, he was struck by how many pieces of art in the museum were Italian treasures that had been pilfered by Napoleon a century earlier.

He claimed that the Mona Lisa had originally been kidnapped by Napoleon.

All he wanted to do as a patriotic Italian was rescue her and bring her home.

This wasn't a crime so much as an unofficial repatriation.

Once this defense was reported by the Italian newspapers, it played incredibly well with the Italian public.

Perugia was jailed as he awaited trial, but by all accounts he had a very comfortable imprisonment.

He was showered with gifts.

We're talking wine, fine cheeses, and cigarettes.

Apparently his supporters made sure he ate an elegantly prepared lunch and dinner every single day.

That's not to mention the thousands of dollars in cash that got sent along by sympathetic Italians who believed that Perugia was no less than a national hero.

But Perugia's defense had a few holes in it.

First, it was based on a historical myth.

Napoleon did not steal the Mona Lisa from Italy.

Now, he certainly plundered many other beloved Renaissance paintings from northern Italy, and many of those paintings were still displayed in the Louvre.

But the Mona Lisa was not one of those paintings.

As we already said, the Mona Lisa had been brought to France by Leonardo himself and had then been purchased for a handsome sum by King Francis I.

So if Perugia was indeed a patriot, he had stolen the wrong painting.

But when Perugia eventually went to trial, his story about being moved by patriotism soon fell apart.

Evidence was presented that he had clearly attempted to sell the painting to non-Italians before trying his hand with the Uffizi.

This included a well-known English art dealer who testified that he had been approached by Perugia but had laughed him off as a hoaxer.

Perugia then came out with a news story that he had stolen the Mona Lisa because she reminded him of a former lover who had tragically died.

He was clearly grasping at straws.

If the Patriot defense wasn't going to work, well then maybe he did it for love.

A close look at the trial and it becomes clear that Perugia underestimated just how people would react to the Mona Lisa disappearing.

He stole it for the same reason that Leonardo took the commission to paint it in the first place.

He needed the money.

Perugia knew the painting was valuable, and he thought he could sell it.

It was only the day after when he saw the papers that he realized that the Mona Lisa was too famous to be sold.

He had to come up with another plan.

He likely came up with the plan to sell it in Florence because the best case scenario was that a true Italian patriot might just buy it.

And worst case scenario, if he was caught, the Italians would surely go easy on him if they thought he had done it for Italy.

Now,

that's just a guess, but in the end, the Italian courts went pretty easy on him.

He was found guilty, but Perugia's defense lawyer shrewdly argued that leniency was in order considering that the crime had hurt no one.

The painting had not been damaged.

In fact, arguably, it had been improved.

The painting that had been returned to the Louvre was considerably more famous and, as such, more valuable than the one that had been stolen.

The Italian court sentenced Perugia to twelve and a half months in prison, most of which he had already served.

The most audacious art theft in history was ultimately punished with a slap on the wrist.

But Perugia's lawyer had a point.

When the Louvre finally received the recovered Mona Lisa, they had indeed received a more valuable painting than the one they had lost.

When it reclaimed its place on the wall of the Salon Carais, the museum once again broke attendance records as people lined up to see the Mona Lisa.

But now these crowds were familiar with the Mona Lisa.

They knew what to expect.

They had seen her face a million times across newspapers, magazines, and postcards.

They all knew about the enigmatic smile and the seductive charm of the painting.

These crowds had been told for the past two years that, quote, there never was a more perfect picture, end quote.

And now they could go see it for themselves.

People have been lining up ever since.

In 2024, the theft of the Mona Lisa has been largely forgotten.

And yet, The celebrity generated by her disappearance and triumphant return has not only remained, it's grown.

I think it's true that when the Mona Lisa was returned, she was changed, but not necessarily for the better.

She was more famous, but I would argue that celebrity has made the Mona Lisa nearly impossible to appreciate.

The glass that Vincenzo Perugia installed in front of the painting created one layer of distance, but his theft created a new layer.

In 1891, Oscar Wilde complained that the ubiquity of Pater's flowery essay had made a pure appreciation of the Mona Lisa impossible.

I wonder what he would think of a century's worth of newspaper headlines, postcard reproductions, artistic parodies, and a never-ending stream of advertising campaigns.

Looking at the Mona Lisa and being reminded of a poetic bit of criticism seems rather civilized, especially now when the painting can't help but bring to mind dumb commercials.

The last time I saw the Mona Lisa, she was drinking a Red Bull.

The real object has been obscured by the aura of her own memeification.

When we go to see the Mona now, we go to look at her celebrity.

And in a way, we aren't all that different from her admirers in 1911, looking at a suggestive empty space on the wall.

Okay,

that's all for this week.

Join us again in two weeks' time when we will explore an all-new historical myth.

Before we go this week, as always, I need to give some shout-outs.

Big ups to Kirsta Swanston,

to Fane,

to James Fox, to Christopher Hammond, to Tammy Hendrickson, to

Aodine,

to

Connor Phelan, to Carol Ann Yarnigan,

to Meredith Buc,

to Christopher Wall

to Colin Cove

and to Ryan Hatley.

All of these people have decided to pledge at $5

or more every month on Patreon.

So you know what that means?

They are beautiful human beings.

Thank you, thank you, thank you to everyone who supports this show at all levels.

If you ever want to get in touch with me, you can always send me an email at ourfakehistory at gmail.com.

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As always, the theme music for this show comes to us from Dirty Church.

Check out more from Dirty Church at dirtychurch.bandcamp.com.

And all the the other music you heard on the show today was written and recorded by me.

My name is Sebastian Major and remember, just because it didn't happen doesn't mean it isn't real.

One, two, three, four.

There's nothing better than a one-play side.