The Crimes of Paris

by Dorothy Hoobler; Thomas Hoobler

  There are numerous copies of the Mona Lisa in existence, some modern but others dating to the time when the original was painted. Some critics argue that Leonardo actually painted more than one version. (If so, perhaps he fulfilled his agreement with Francesco del Giocondo and completed a portrait of his wife, but was so taken by his subject that he painted another that he continued to work on for years.) A Gioconda at the Hermitage in Saint Petersburg has an exposed breast and is thought to have been painted by Leonardo’s pupil and heir, Francesco Melzi. It was not uncommon for pupils to imitate their masters’ work in this way, nor would it have been unusual for one or more copies to be made, since there was no other way to increase the audience for a work of art. Donald Sassoon, a modern historian, has written, “We know that Leonardo was widely admired during his lifetime because of the number of copies made of his works. In an age when information about a painting could travel only through written comments and the production of copies, the activities of Leonardo’s followers… functioned as an information system which contributed to the expansion of his fame.” 41

  Vasari was also the first to note what has become the most commented-on feature of the painting: the smile. “Since Mona Lisa was very beautiful,” he wrote, “Leonardo employed this technique while he was painting her portrait — he had musicians who played or sang and clowns who would always make her merry in order to drive away her melancholy, which painting often brings to portraits. And in this portrait by Leonardo, there is a smile so pleasing that it seems more divine than human, and it was considered a wondrous thing that it was as lively as the smile of the living original.” 42

  Vasari never saw the actual painting. One contemporary who did was Antonio de Beatis, the secretary of an influential cardinal, who kept a journal of the cardinal’s trip to France in August 1517. They visited François I in his castle at Rouen, where Leonardo lived in an adjoining residence connected by a tunnel. De Beatis wrote that Leonardo showed his visitors three paintings, one the portrait of a “Florentine lady.” He describes them as “tucti perfectissimi” (“all of the greatest perfection”). 43

  A century later, when the painting was at Fontainebleau, the royal château that François I had renovated and expanded, Cassiano del Pozzo, an Italian scholar, came to view it. He wrote of it afterward as “the best-known work of this painter, because she lacks only the power of speech.” 44 More important, he called the painting La Gioconda, confirming the sitter’s identity as Lisa Gherardini, who at the age of sixteen, in 1495, had married Francesco del Giocondo of Florence. The identification has been challenged over the years, but most authorities agree that the portrait is of this particular woman, who would have been in her mid-twenties when she sat for Leonardo.

  During the reign of Louis XIV (1643–1715), the painting occupied a place of honor in the king’s personal gallery at the grand residence he built at Versailles. His successor, Louis XV (reigned 1715–74), however, preferred the more erotic, openly joyful works of such artists as Fragonard and Boucher and sent Leonardo’s work to hang ignominiously in the office of the keeper of the royal buildings. In 1750, the king’s courtiers selected the 110 best works of art in his collection for an exhibition. La Joconde was not included.

  After the Revolution, the former royal palace known as the Louvre became a gallery open to all citizens, who could view the treasures formerly owned by kings and nobility. In 1797 the Mona Lisa was chosen to be one of the works displayed there. Ironically, Fragonard, once the court favorite, was now a lowly employee of the new regime’s artistic policy makers and was assigned to transport the Mona Lisa from Versailles to the Louvre. It didn’t remain there long, for when Napoleon Bonaparte took power, he ordered the painting to be hung in his bedroom. Later, after the Louvre was renamed the Musée Napoléon, he allowed the painting to be returned to public display. He was the last to enjoy such a personal relationship with the portrait until someone carried her off in August 1911.

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  Tastes in art ebb and flow, and in the early part of the nineteenth century the Mona Lisa was not regarded with the same awe it enjoys today. Nor was Leonardo himself universally esteemed. William Hazlitt, an English critic, wrote in 1817 that Leonardo “vitiated his paintings with too much science.” 45 At midcentury, a committee of experts was asked to give a monetary value to the Louvre’s works. The Mona Lisa was valued highly, at 90,000 francs, but well below works by other masters. Two of Raphael’s paintings, for example, were given price tags of 400,000 and 600,000 francs. 46

  The audience for fine art had previously been restricted exclusively to those who were able to travel to museums to view the works on display, and to the even fewer people who could afford to buy such works. But after about 1840, technological developments, such as photography and new printing techniques, made it possible to mass-produce reproductions of fine art. Critics who had previously confined themselves merely to describing and evaluating works of art expanded their role. For now that anyone could view fine art for themselves, critics needed to justify their superior position by taking on the role of popular interpreter.

  Nevertheless, literary artists popularized Mona Lisa before the art critics did. The Irish poet Thomas Moore wrote of “Mona Lisa, on whose eyes / A painter for whole years might gaze.” 47 The Goncourt brothers, Edmond and Jules, popular French novelists of the mid-nineteenth century, described a hero’s mistress: “All women are enigmas, but she is the most mysterious of them all… and wears, like an enchanted mask, the smile full of night of the Gioconda.” 48

  Théophile Gautier (1811–72), a prolific French author of novels, poems, travel books, and criticism, waxed ecstatic over the portrait of Mona Lisa. In a review of an 1855 play titled La Joconde (though the subject matter did not concern the real-life Mona Lisa), he began, “La Joconde! This name makes me think immediately of this sphinx of beauty who smiles so mysteriously in Leonardo da Vinci’s painting, and who seems to pose a yet unresolved riddle to the admiring centuries.” 49 A dozen years later, writing a guide to the Louvre, he recalled those words and added, “I have seen her frequently, since then, this adorable Joconde. She is always there smiling with sensuality, mocking her numerous lovers. She has the serene countenance of a woman sure that she will remain beautiful for ever and certain to be greater than the ideal of poets and artists.” 50

  Shortly afterward, in an essay published in November 1869, a thirty-year-old English critic, Walter Pater, offered his own paean to the Mona Lisa. “La Gioconda is, in the truest sense, Leonardo’s masterpiece,” Pater wrote. Expanding on Gautier’s observations, he noted “the unfathomable smile, always with a touch of something sinister in it, which plays over all Leonardo’s work.… From childhood we see this image defining itself on the fabric of his dreams; and but for express historical testimony, we might fancy that this was but his ideal lady embodied and beheld at last.” 51 It was a thought later taken up by a certain Viennese physician.

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  Only a year before the Mona Lisa was stolen, Sigmund Freud, one of the founders of the new science of psychology, wrote a small book titled Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of His Childhood. In his notebooks, Leonardo had described a recurrent dream that he had, and dreams were to Freud significant indicators of the psyche. Like the scientists who were finding a new physical world — atoms, X-rays, quanta — previously hidden from view, so Freud sought to uncover secrets of the mind below the level of consciousness.

  Leonardo had been born in Vinci, a small town near Florence, in 1452, the illegitimate son of a woman named Caterina; his father was Piero da Vinci, a notary who worked for the Signoria of Florence. Though Piero married another woman in the year of Leonardo’s birth, he acknowledged the boy as his son and later brought him into his household. Leonardo’s earliest years, however, were spent with Caterina.

  Freud, like Pater, found the enigmatic smile not only in the Mona Lisa but in other paintings by Leonardo, notably St. John the Baptist and Virgin and Child with St. Anne. The smi
le, Freud wrote, “has produced the most powerful and confusing effect on whoever looks at it.” 52 He felt that it held special meaning for the artist, because he used it several times, and surmised that when he first encountered it on the face of Lisa, the model for Mona Lisa, “it awoke something in him which had for long lain dormant in his mind — probably an old memory.” It was, Freud concluded, “the smile of bliss and rapture which had once played on his mother’s lips as she fondled him.” 53 The recurring dream Leonardo described was of the tail of a bird striking his mouth over and over. That image, Freud suggested, may well have been caused by the memory of his mother kissing him.

  Freud thought that Leonardo was a homosexual, though the only proof for this is that the artist never married and was once accused in court of practicing sodomy, a charge he was cleared of. Couching his argument in genteel terms, Freud said that at the time Leonardo encountered his mother’s smile on the face of the real-life Mona Lisa, he

  had for long been under the dominance of an inhibition which forbade him ever again to desire such caresses from the lips of women. But he had become a painter, and therefore he strove to reproduce the smile with his brush, giving it to all his pictures.… The figures [in the pictures, including Leda, John the Baptist, and Bacchus, as well as Mona Lisa]… gaze in mysterious triumph, as if they knew of a great achievement of happiness, about which silence must be kept. The familiar smile of fascination leads one to guess that it is a secret of love. It is possible that in these figures Leonardo has denied the unhappiness of his erotic life 54 and has triumphed over it in his art, by representing the wishes of the boy, infatuated with his mother, as fulfilled in this blissful union of the male and female natures. 55

  Perhaps following Freud’s lead, others began to speculate that love must hold the secret behind the theft. Just as Napoleon had hung the painting in his bedroom, so perhaps now someone had felt such desire for the portrait that he had stolen it. Indeed, Leonardo himself had told the story of such a man, who conceived a carnal love for one of the artist’s other works: “Such is the power of a painting over a man’s mind that he may be enchanted and enraptured by a painting that does not represent any living woman,” Leonardo wrote. “It previously happened to me that I made a picture representing a holy subject, which was bought by someone who loved it and who wished to remove the attributes of divinity in order that he might kiss it without guilt. But finally his conscience overcame his sighs and lust, and he was forced to banish it from his house.” 56

  Contributing to the speculation along these lines was the fact that shortly before the theft, the Louvre had received a postcard addressed to the Mona Lisa. It was a “red-hot love declaration, peppered with ‘I love you’s’ and ‘I adore you’s.’” 57 It raised the possibility that the theft had been the work of an erotomaniac, someone obsessed enough with the subject of the painting that he might steal it. The employees of the Louvre now recalled that a young man, blond with blue eyes, would come almost every day to stand enraptured in front of the Mona Lisa as if he could not drag himself away. Clearly, this person should be high on the list of suspects. But no one knew his name.

  The editor of Le Temps found this idea appealing enough to ask Dr. Georges Dumas, professor of experimental psychology at the Sorbonne, to write about the psychology of the thief. Dumas eagerly responded to the suggestion. “As to the mentality of such a thief,” he wrote, “one will find it described in medical works, where such lunatics are called fetishists, who tremble in the presence of beauty and become obsessed by it, often showing much ingenuity and energy in obtaining symbols of such beauty. Such a person would have carried Mona Lisa to his rooms trembling with joy, gloating over the possession like a miser, perhaps in frenzy injuring the picture. When at last his insane passion spends its force he may return the picture to the Louvre.” 58 However, Dumas added ominously, there was the possibility that the thief would take pleasure in “mutilating, stabbing, and defiling” it.

  Dumas, like Professor Reiss, was assuming the role of a criminal profiler, even though such an occupation did not exist at that time. He was making an educated guess, based on the new science of psychology. Fiction writers, who had employed psychology for a much longer time than psychologists, adopted his theory and elaborated on it.

  “Le harem des images,” a 1913 short story by the writer Jules Bois, has as its central character John Lewis. Like J. P. Morgan, Lewis is an American millionaire, but one who, unlike Morgan, steals his art treasures instead of purchasing them. (Perhaps, to French readers, stealing them was morally no different from buying them, as long as they ended up in the hands of uncivilized Americans.) In the story, Lewis has created a private museum in his Paris apartment, where he displays for his own enjoyment artistic treasures that he has stolen from European collections. The narrator of the tale lets the reader know that Lewis’s motivation is that he suffers from a sexual compulsion when he is confronted by artistic renditions of female beauty. He has, in other words, created a “harem” of painted and sculpted women who are his sexual captives. Mona Lisa is only his latest, and greatest, possession. Eventually, when he tires of his captives, he returns them.

  “Within a few years,” the narrator of “Le harem des images” tells the reader, “Leonardo’s marvel will be returned to the Louvre. Until then, may every Sherlock Holmes exhaust his imagination!” 59

  Sherlock Holmes, of course, was a fictional detective, but his combination of intuitive brilliance and scientific precision was indeed what was required, for the search for a solution to the Mona Lisa theft would involve science as much as art. To probe its secrets, the painting had earlier been photographed with magnifying lenses and even X-rayed, revealing that Leonardo had rearranged the position of the hands before settling on the final version. The pattern of craquelure — cracks that had appeared on the surface of the paint over time — had also been photographed. Since this pattern was impossible to duplicate, it was thought to be a guarantee against any copy’s being used to replace the original.

  But of course the theft raised issues that were uncanny and immeasurable. It was Pater who came closest to expressing the strange atmosphere that emanates from the figure in the painting:

  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; 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 moulded the changing lineaments, and tinged the eyelids and the hands. The fancy of a perpetual life, sweeping together ten thousand experiences, is an old one.… Certainly Lady Lisa might stand as the embodiment of the old fancy, the symbol of the modern idea. 60

  Pater’s essay made him famous and made the Mona Lisa seem more than merely a painting — it was a nearly living thing, eternal and bewitching, and now it was gone.

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  SYMPATHY FOR THE DEVIL

  The headline of the newspaper Paris-Journal for Wednesday, August 23, 1911 (the day after the theft of the Mona Lisa was discovered), read

  IS ARSÈNE LUPIN ALIVE?

  MONA LISA GONE FROM THE LOUVRE! 1

  Arsène Lupin was well known to the Paris-Journal’s readers, for he was as famous a fictional character in France as Sherlock Holmes was in England. Lupin, however, was a master thief. In Paris, where many people’s sympathies were with the criminal, not with the police, imaginary heroes were often those on the wrong side of the law.

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  Crime in France had a long literary tradition, both in fiction and in fact — beginning with Vidocq, the real-life Frenchman who was the inspiration for countless crime stories (including those written by the American Edgar Allan Poe). Vidocq had been a legendary criminal before he became a policeman — and some thought he continued to cross the line throughout
his career.

  He liked to suddenly reveal himself to people who had not seen through his current disguise, announcing, “I am Vidocq, and I arrest you.” 2 Even today, his towering figure (contemporaries claimed he could appear tall or short, as suited his purposes) stands at the beginning of the history of modern criminology as well as the beginning of the detective story.

  Much of what is known about Vidocq comes from his Memoirs, which were written with the assistance of Honoré de Balzac, one of France’s great novelists, and even the Memoirs are apparently as much a product of imagination as of memory. Fact or fiction? Vidocq blurred the line.

  François-Eugène Vidocq begins the story of his life in typically dramatic fashion:

  I was born at Arras, but as my constant disguise, the mobility of my features, and a singular aptness in make-up have caused some doubt about my age, it will not be superfluous to state that I came into the world on the twenty-third of July, 1775, in a house near where Robespierre had been born sixteen years earlier. It was during the night; rain poured down in torrents; thunder rumbled; as a result a relative, who combined the functions of midwife and sibyl, drew the conclusion that my career would be a stormy one. In those days there were still good people who believed in omens, while in these enlightened times men rely on the infallibility of fortune-tellers. 3

  Even as a young man, Vidocq stood out from the crowd. Very large and strong, he was the terror of his neighborhood and was continually in fights. “My father’s house was on the Place d’Armes, the customary meeting-place for all the blackguards of the quarter, and here I early exercised my muscles in thrashing regularly my comrades.… All they heard at home were stories of injured ears, black eyes, and torn clothes. By the time I was eight I was the terror of all the dogs, cats, and children of the neighborhood.” 4 He earned the name locally of Le Vautrin (the Wild Boar), a name that Balzac later gave to a recurring fictional character based upon Vidocq.