by Rick Gekoski
The result, if you look at the pictures side by side (they were exhibited together, for the first time, at the Louvre in March 2012), is that the studio copy is much clearer and gives a much better idea of the original composition. On the left of La Gioconda’s head, the craggy landscape is crisp, with the details of the grey rock formations absolutely precise. In comparison, this whole area in the original is much darker and obscure in detail.
But even if the Louvre version had been restored, and (let us surmise) the two pictures were now well nigh indistinguishable, the Leonardo would still be entitled to the greater respect and admiration, for his picture carries with it the facts of its composition and can be traced to his own hand. What we have now are two competing versions, one restored to what it may originally have looked like in the early sixteenth century, the other bearing all too obviously the effects of time upon a painted surface. I greatly prefer the latter, not just because it is the original, but because I like what time does to things, how ageing deepens and shadows, produces a glow of its own. Patination is why we admire seventeenth-century oak cupboards, respond so deeply to the depth and glow that the wood acquires over the centuries. Our response to the Mona Lisa in the Louvre, its eerie and unexpected combination of filminess and the sharp reality that throws her smile into such enigmatic relief, is the effect of the years upon the surface of the paint, so that the sitter seems to emerge from the depths of a shimmering timelessness.
We speak too frequently of the ravages of time and too little of the glow that it can produce. The villa of Calpurnius Piso, which was destroyed in the eruption of Vesuvius, and which housed one of the finest libraries of Classical antiquity, provided the model for the first Getty Museum, which opened in 1974. I visited the museum in 2006, just after a major renovation from its original incarnation, and hated it at first sight. No patination, no gravitas. Kapow! So bright and new, the reds fresh as the day they came out of the can, the yellows too insistent, released from the effects of time. The effect was startling, unsettling and unpleasant. So many bright colours, so many new statues, rooms, fountains, courtyards. It looked like a well-designed McMansion, vulgar and self-important. Nouveau Riche. I yearned to experience it in its old age, tired, ruined, Roman! Lacking antiquity, spared both the enhancements and the ravages of time, it simply looked like a house that one would never – no matter how much money one had – build for oneself, or even consent to visit, unless one were a Roman, way back then.
The Getty villa is not a restoration but a replica, and rather less successful than some other attempts to recreate the past, such as the shockingly beautiful Ishtar Gate at Berlin’s Pergamon Museum, which was partly built with materials excavated from the original site. Yet restoration provides us with an analogous set of problems to replication, for if the restorer attempts to return an object to its original state (a topic much in dispute in the profession), they are in danger of making something old look, simply, as if it were new. There was ferocious criticism in 1994, when an over-zealous cleansing of Michelangelo’s decorations to the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel produced a result so fresh that many people felt that, if the grimy encrustation of time had been stripped from the surfaces, so had the gravitas. The result could have been recently painted by my old neighbour Mr Andrews, if he’d been as talented as he claimed.
And so, alas and rather shamingly, it was him of whom I was thinking on my first visit to the Louvre in 1963, as I approached the Mona Lisa. It was hard to get a proper look at it, but from the few bits I could discern it was clearly better than the version that fooled all those curators, in Mr Andrews’s living room. On later visits to Paris, in the late 1960s, during my years at Oxford, I always made it a point to pop into the Louvre to revisit the Mona Lisa, as if dropping in on a friend. Drawn, in the first instances, by the painting’s mystique – the most famous painting in the world! That enigmatic smile, that inimitably captivating presence! – I later came to be more interested in the crowds surrounding it than in the picture itself. These were then stereotyped as ‘camera-laden Japanese tourists’, but you weren’t allowed to take pictures, and only a small percentage of the visitors were Japanese anyway.
It didn’t matter where you were from, the behaviour was exactly the same: spectators rising on tiptoes, craning their necks, trying to get a glimpse of her Mona-ness. What these frustrated viewers had in common was simple. Desperate to view they might have been, but few of them seemed to know a damn thing about art. Art wasn’t the point. She, herself, that smiling icon, she was the point. The gathered throng had come not to see a painting, but to peer at a celebrity: they were aesthetic paparazzi. The only tragedy was that you were not allowed to get your camera out. What a missed opportunity! To have one’s picture taken with such a lady!
The history of the painting is a little obscure, but it most likely dates from Leonardo’s residence in Florence between 1503 and 1505. Even by contemporary standards the picture was technically remarkable for its use of sfumato, by which the background dissolves in form, giving a mysterious blending of light and shade, and an unearthly timelessness. Leonardo achieved this effect, according to recent research at the Centre de Recherche et de Restauration des Musées de France, by applying over forty layers – probably using his fingers rather than a brush – of thin glaze. If you mix this with various pigments, you will eventually get the blurry shadowy quality that can be observed round the Mona Lisa’s mouth, and that evanescent smile which seems to come and go: an uncommon example of a smile being wiped not off but onto someone’s face. According to the researcher Philippe Walter, ‘even today, Leonardo’s realisation of such a thin layer remains an amazing feat.’
Yet the smile for which the lady was to become famous did not strike its first onlookers as remarkable. A contemporary manual describing the correct deportment of young ladies recommends just such a look: ‘close the mouth at the right corner with a suave and nimble movement’, it advises, ‘and open it on the left side, as if you were smiling secretly.’ Some years later, Leonardo was to use a similar smile on the faces of his pictures of St Anne (1510) and St John (1516), both of which also hang in the Louvre. Curiously, that expression seems to fit the face of women and men equally well. In fact, a number of commentators, both ancient and modern, have maintained that the reason for La Gioconda’s apparent bemusement is that she is actually a self-portrait of the artist in drag – which a computer expert in 1997 claimed he could prove by almost seamlessly superimposing Leonardo’s face over that of his supposed subject.
Perhaps this is why Leonardo loved the picture so much that he couldn’t bear to relinquish it. He travelled with her as with a mistress – he couldn’t keep his hands off her – until, some time in the 1530s, he sold the painting to François I for the enormous sum of about $100,000 in today’s money. From that time the portrait was the possession of the kings of France until it was deposited in the Louvre early in the eighteenth century. It became an immediate favourite at the new gallery, and its fame grew as the century progressed.
On the morning of 21 August 1911 the Louvre was closed, as it always was on Mondays. Nevertheless, a staff of over 800 people might be found within the building’s massive confines: the museum covers over 49 acres and houses half a million works of art. Some time between 7.00 and 8.30 in the morning – while one of the attendants went for coffee and another was sleeping – someone walked into the Salon Carré, took the Mona Lisa off the wall and vanished. Its absence was noted within the hour, but it was assumed that the painting had been taken to be photographed. As the hours passed, its absence was increasingly remarked: ‘Has anyone seen the Mona Lisa?’ First curiously, then anxiously, then frantically, the question was repeated during the course of the day. Where was it? No, it wasn’t being photographed, nor had it been removed for conservation or cleaning, nor were there plans to reframe or rehang it. There was no reason for it not to be there. ‘Has anyone seen the Mona Lisa?’
Many hours passed before the unthinkable was confirm
ed. The picture’s frame was found in a stairwell, but the lady herself had vanished. ‘It was as if someone had stolen one of the towers of Notre Dame’, said the museum’s Director, Théophile Homolle, as if to suggest that the painting had been equally securely in its place. It hadn’t been: security at the Louvre was so lax, and objects disappeared with such frequency, that it was mildly surprising that anything was left there at all.
On Tuesday morning sixty police officers were dispatched, art lovers coming out of the Louvre were searched, railway stations were patrolled. But it was too late; the thief had had too long to get away. Where did he go? Where did she? Who took her? Reports in the newspapers treated the case as an abduction, or a kidnapping, rather than a mere theft.
The police and public were desperate for a quick arrest. Rumours flew about. The picture had been stolen to blackmail the government! Perhaps by a gang! That would do it. And some sort of conspiracy too. An informant calling himself Baron Ignace d’Ormesson approached the Paris-Journal newspaper with a story of how, four years earlier, he had regularly stolen objects from the Louvre’s Asiatic Antiquities section, and then sold them to various people in Paris. It was easy, he said, as long as the object wasn’t too big. Prompted to do it again, he quickly produced (for a price of 250 francs) a newly pilfered object, which was displayed in the newspaper’s office. Crowds flocked to see it. Presumably this (now vanished) baron, if he could be apprehended, was also responsible for the theft of the Mona Lisa?
Perhaps – the speculation was distinctly flimsy – this baron was connected to that band of radical artists who wished to overthrow the established order? It was a time of revolutionary anarchism, both ineffectual and murderous, and extreme opinions were relentlessly à la mode, like the latest frocks. The poet Guillaume Apollinaire, for instance, adamantly insisted that all museums had to be destroyed, as the old made way for a new world of imagining. He and his friend Pablo Picasso, who held similar opinions, signed a manifesto pledging to burn down the Louvre. Why not? They were advocates of Marinetti’s Futurist Manifesto of 1909, which was unambiguous in its revolutionary rhetoric:
We are issuing this manifesto of ruinous and incendiary violence, by which we today are founding Futurism, because we want to deliver Italy from its gangrene of professors, archaeologists, tourist guides and antiquaries.
Italy has been too long the great second-hand market. We want to get rid of the innumerable museums which cover it with innumerable cemeteries.
The threatened violence is, of course, metaphorical at best, largely fatuous bombast, but easily mistaken for something more dangerous. Bombs, after all, were being detonated. The Royal Observatory in Greenwich had been bombed in 1894 (prompting Conrad’s 1907 novel The Secret Agent): if these lunatics could attack the very site and idea of Time, surely they could attempt to destroy Art and History as well?
The police rarely read anarchist manifestos as symbolic and aesthetic statements, and they were right not to do so. How does one distinguish a bunch of artists fuelled by revolutionary fervour from a band of anarchists genuinely determined to blow things up? The period between 1880 and the start of the First World War was one of terrifying and widespread anarchist activity. Real bombs, real stabbings, real death. Anarchist attacks occurred in sixteen countries, and (excluding Russia, which is almost a story on its own) over 500 people were killed worldwide.
La bande à Picasso – or the Wild Men of Paris, as they were sometimes known – were perfect suspects: what better than to steal the painting and hold it for some sort of ransom? What sort? Who knows? No one was thinking very clearly. It was time for an arrest!
Picasso was particularly vulnerable, for he had been the purchaser of some statuettes stolen from the Louvre, which could be found in his flat in the Boulevard de Clichy. Rushing back from Céret, where he had been painting in the French Pyrenees, he was met at the railway station by the terrified Apollinaire, whose flat had recently been raided by the police. If Picasso’s was similarly investigated, the presence of the two statuettes, each bearing the Louvre’s ownership stamp, would have been unambiguously incriminating. They had been purchased from the elusive Baron d’Ormesson, and there is good reason to suppose that they may have been stolen to order. The two pieces – Bronze Age statuettes from Spain of a man and a woman carved in stone – had provided inspiration for Picasso’s revolutionary painting Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907). Aware that he was perilously at risk, Picasso bundled them into a suitcase and made a midnight visit to the Seine, criss-crossing the roads to avoid being followed. But he couldn’t force himself to destroy the works and returned to his flat disconsolate, with the damning evidence still in his possession.
Some nineteen days after the theft of the Mona Lisa, the painter was interviewed in his studio by the gendarmerie, and summoned to appear before a magistrate on the charge of receiving art stolen from the Louvre, though (curiously) the detectives did not search the premises in search of it. Picasso was terrified. In the courtroom he met a distraught and dishevelled Apollinaire, who had already spent two days in jail. Apollinaire had already confessed to everything and anything proposed to him by the police, implicating Picasso in the purchase of the two statuettes.
‘And what do you have to say to this?’ the Magistrate demanded of Picasso.
Picasso wept, begged forgiveness, denied everything, including any acquaintance with Apollinaire. Eventually released on his own recognisance but banned from leaving Paris, Picasso was allowed to return home, where he lived in a state of high anxiety for some months. A few days later Apollinaire was freed from jail – the lack of any evidence implicating him had proven something of an obstacle – and he was later to call it ‘strange, incredible, tragic and amusing’ that he was the only person in France ever arrested for the theft of the Mona Lisa.
When the Louvre reopened, a week following the theft, thousands of people – including Franz Kafka and Max Brod – queued for hours to enter the Salon Carré simply to gaze at the empty space where the Mona Lisa had hung. It was enough to make a French philosopher – a Sartre or a Lacan (who, curiously, was later Picasso’s doctor) – swoon with delight. If Mona Lisa had been a compelling presence, she was even more fascinating in her absence. (As Gertrude Stein observed in a different context, it was a time when paintings were trying to escape from their frames.)
The newspapers were ferociously critical: the French love blaming. The Director of the Louvre and the chief attendant were fired. Hoaxes were posited, suspicious eyes were cast on the Germans. Alphonse Bertillon, who had recently invented a method of fingerprint identification, was called in, and lifted a beauty from the abandoned frame. Unfortunately he couldn’t match it to any of those he had on file (it came from the wrong thumb).
In fact, it didn’t take a Sherlock Holmes – hardly even an Inspector Clouseau – to figure out the first place to look. If the lady had been snatched, it had to have been done quickly, and only an expert could have done that. The Mona Lisa had been mounted on the wall using four iron pegs. If you knew how to do it, the picture came off in a matter of seconds. But (as police attempts to remove a picture clumsily demonstrated), if you didn’t know the trick, it could take two men up to five minutes. Where to look? It was almost certainly an inside job. How about one of the people who had re-installed the picture only a year earlier?
Vincenzo Peruggia, an itinerant Italian picture framer, had been one of the team who were responsible for the picture’s re-hanging. He was interviewed, but (unlike the Director of the Louvre) he was never fingerprinted. Why should he be? Everyone agreed the painting had been taken by a criminal mastermind, either stolen on behalf of a reclusive and ruthless American millionaire or held to ransom. Or maybe it was one of those dratted anarchists.
In fact, though, it was the unprepossessing Italian who had walked unobserved into the gallery, taken the picture and removed it from its frame, and strolled out with it hidden under the white smock worn by many of the museum staff. For over two years the
Mona Lisa languished in her lover’s squalid bed-sitting room before Peruggia, his passion slaked, decided it was time for her to go home.
It was at this point, I suspect, that he concocted the story that was to make him a national hero. Single-handedly, he claimed, he had performed a patriotic act: he was returning the Mona Lisa to Italy, from which (he wrongly believed) she had been taken by the vile Napoleon. Ignorant of the possible avenues for selling stolen pictures, Peruggia wrote to a leading art dealer in Florence, Alfredo Geri, who had recently advertised for old pictures. Signing his letter ‘Leonardo’, the thief offered the Mona Lisa, suggesting that Geri come to Paris to view the painting, for which he was asking 100,000 francs (ironically, roughly identical to its price in the 1530s).
All dealers get a host of apparently cranky letters, and mostly we throw them away. Geri almost did so too, until an obscure intuition made him pause. After all, the lady was out there somewhere … He enticed Peruggia and his consort to Florence, arguing plausibly that the Director of the Uffizi needed to verify the authenticity of the picture before he could proceed with the purchase. On Wednesday, 17 November 1913, Geri and Giovanni Poggi went to ‘Leonardo’s’ modest hotel room, where (in Geri’s words):
He locked the door and drew out from under his bed a trunk of white wood that was full of wretched objects: broken shoes, a mangled hat, a pair of pliers, plastering tools, a smock, some paint brushes, and even a mandolin. Then, from under a false bottom in the box he took out an object wrapped in red silk … and to our astonished eyes the divine ‘Gioconda’ appeared, intact and marvellously preserved.
There was no doubt about authenticity: the picture still bore on its reverse the identifying marks from the Louvre. They inspected the picture minutely, admired it extravagantly and called the police.
