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The Lost Mona Lisa (2000)

by R.A. Scotti(Favorite Author)

3.74 of 5 Votes: 4

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English

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review 1: On Monday August 22, 2011, Leonardo da Vinci's painting the Mona Lisa was stolen from the Louvre in Paris. Quite a hullabaloo ensued.The museum was closed to the public on Mondays, and the painting's absence was noticed only on Tuesday when Louis Beroud arrived to continue his hobby of painting a copy of the original, an activity encouraged then by the Louvre. It was not immediately apparent that a theft had occurred, as the museum had no administrative process to track when paintings were removed from the galleries for photography or other purposes. AFter some checking with the photography department, it became apparent that innocent explanations for the absence were unlikely and the Paris police called in during the early afternoon. The theft was made easier because t... morehe Louvre did not securely fasten its pictures to the walls, so the picture and its protective case could be simply lifted from the wall. The picture's frame and the protective case were found in a service stairway. France's best crime scene investigator, Alphonse Bertillon, was called in and was able to lift a perfect thumbprint, from a left hand, off the frame.This clue had no immediate effect on the investigation. Despite thoroughly searching the museum and interviewing and fingerprinting the staff, no further evidence was found. Thanks to a sort of prank carried out in the columns of a Paris newspaper, the Paris-Journal, a set of different thefts were uncovered, however. In return for cash, an anonymous thief turned over a statuette removed from the Louvre, and told the newspaper that he had stolen other small items and sold them to a painter friend. The art critic Guillaume Apollinaire was arrested for this theft, given away by the nom de plume used in the article, Baron Ignace d'Ormesan, the name of a character in collection of stories by Apollinaire. Most likely a former house guest (and lover?) of Apollinaire, Joseph Gery Peret, had stolen the items and Apollinaire had been aware of the thefts. Pablo Picasso, , Apollinaire's friend, was the painter referred to the article as the receiver of the stolen goods, one of which was represented in his Les Demoiselle d'Avignon. The police were however disappointed in their hope that Apollinaire and his coterie had been involved in the theft of the Mona Lisa.The investigation came to a standstill. Nothing was learned of the whereabouts of the painting until Vincenzo Peruggia, an Italian who had worked in the Louvre, attempted to sell the painting to the Italian art dealer Alfredo Geri in December 2013. Meeting Geri in his home city of Florence, Peruggia attempted to sell the painting to Geri on December 11. Geri and Uffizi museum director Giovanni Poggi instead called the police, after having removed the painting from Peruggia's hotel room under pretence of needing to take it to the Uffizi to make comparisons to ensure its authenticity.Peruggia claimed to be motivated by Italian patriotism, stealing the Mona Lisa to get back at France in general and Napoleon in particular for stealing so much Italian art work a century earlier. Aside from the fact that the Mona Lisa arrived in France when Leonardo moved their at the invitation of the French monarch Francois I in 1516, various notes and letters of Peruggia, as well as the testimony of his family, suggest he was motivated by money. Peruggia should have been caught in France at the time of the theft; the police interviewed him as a former employee of the Louvre, but failed to search his room or note that he had a minor criminal record in France. The fingerprint on the frame would have been evidence that he was involved, but the print was from the left hand and at the time the French police used only the prints on the right hand to cross-reference their fingerprint records. Peruggia spent a little over half a year in an Italian prison, and afterwards was a solid citizen who served in the Italian army in the First World War, married, and returned to France to open a shop, dying in 1947. It is unclear if Peruggia acted with more than the low-level assistance he eventually fingered. The author, R. A. Scotti, wonders if Peruggia would have thought of the theft on his own. In June 1932 the American journalist Karl Decker published a story in the Saturday Evening Post that said that 18 years earlier a rich Argentinean who went by the pseudonym Marques Eduardo de Valfierno had told Decker in Casablanca that he, Valfierno, had arranged the theft. Supposedly the point of the theft was that it made possible the sale of number of forgeries of the Mona Lisa to gullible but rich Americans, because without the original around there was no way to disprove the authenticity of the paintings. Presumably no one would compare the copies to each other because as each owner believed to be the possessor of the original, that would have been tantamount to being involved in the theft. Unfortunately for this excellent story, Decker during his long career, Decker is not a good source because during his longer career with the Hurst papers he had learned to fabric news when nothing interesting was going on, and there is no independent evidence for the existence of the Marques Eduardo de Valfierno. So we still don't know.
review 2: Disappointed to learn that the creative and thoughtful writer R.A. Scotti will not grace us with another published piece. She is an exquisite writer who not only has a knack for telling an engaging story, she uses a wide variety of structure and surprise in her word selections. This is a thoroughly engaging tale of a crime and its unresolved mystery with historical certainties (or lack thereof) teased out inthe most pertinent areas. I learned about Leonardo da Vinci, the uniqueness of his artistic creation in the Mona Lisa and the theft that turned the high brow painting to a populist phenom a century ago. A favored book that narrowly escapes a five star rating because it is likely not to be read again soon by this reader. Delightful nonetheless. less

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