by R. A. Scotti
I
Friday, August 25
MONA LISA HAD THE most famous face in the world, and the most uncertain identity. Who was she? What was her relationship to Leonardo, and what was the secret of her smile? Generations of art historians had puzzled over her many aspects. Now there was an urgent new mystery to plumb: Where was she? Who took her, and most perplexing of all, why?
When Mona Lisa slipped out of her frames, she seemed to change from a missing masterpiece to a missing person. She came alive in the popular imagination. The public felt her loss as emotionally as an abduction or a kidnapping. Captivated by her mystery and romance, crowds gathered outside the Louvre each day, awaiting word from the prisonlike fortress that had failed to keep her safe. More people jammed Rue de Rivoli than ever visited the museum when it was open. Mona Lisa had always seemed più vita che la vivacità—more alive than life itself. The first description ever written of her said, “She does not appear to be painted, but truly of flesh and blood.”∗2
One French paper after another promised generous rewards for her return. The popular weekly pictorial L'Illustration offered ten thousand francs ($40,000) for information and forty thousand francs ($160,000) if the painting were returned to the newspaper office, both good for one month, plus a bonus if the return was made by September 1. L'Illustration received more than five hundred letters in a single day, and more than one hundred readers crowded the newsroom. The Paris-Journal, which also set a September i deadline, offered fifty thousand francs ($200,000) and a promise of anonymity to anyone who turned Mona Lisa in to the paper.
The government joined in with a reward of twenty-five thousand francs ($100,000). To angry and bereaved Parisians, it seemed a meager response to such a monumental loss. Henri Rochefort, a member of les Amis du Louvre, a group of wealthy museum patrons, told Le Figaro, “The Mona Lisa thief wants like all thieves to realize the price of his booty”∗3 He proposed a campaign to raise one million francs ($400 million today), and he personally pledged to double the government's reward.
2
THE POLICE HAD THE FRAMES, a fingerprint, the date and approximate time of the theft, and a possible accomplice in the plumber Sauve, but they still had no idea how Mona Lisa had left the Louvre. She was not a canvas that could be rolled up and sneaked out of the museum or the country. Leonardo had painted her on a solid panel of white Lombardy poplar, twenty-one by thirty-one inches.
Mona Lisa would be difficult to conceal even without her frames, yet every exit guard insisted that she had not gone through his door. One attendant remembered stopping a workman with a wheelbarrow of trash around nine o'clock Monday morning and sifting through the debris. There was nothing resembling the painting in the barrow. Eight possible exits from the Louvre and eight firm denials from the guards. Mona Lisa was gone, but was she stolen? Was the vanishing act a crime or a hoax? Initial shock turned quickly to suspicion that the painting was still on the premises.
A few months before, a reporter had spent a night in a sarcophagus to expose lax security at the Louvre. A museum has no absolute defense against a cunning thief or sure protection against a crazed vandal, yet even allowing for the inherent difficulties, the art treasures of France were poorly guarded. Louvre security was casual at best. One hundred passkeys that unlocked every door in the museum were floating around the building. There was no alarm system. The most valuable works were not secured to the walls in any way. There was no surveillance over the photo process. Paintings were not signed in or out. And the Louvre was packed with political appointees.
Was Mona Lisa's disappearance a prank to dramatize the problem? Or were disgruntled Louvre workers settling scores? They had just won a bruising battle to unionize, and emotions were raw on both sides. Worse yet, were curators covering up an unforgivable crime? According to this scenario, the beautiful face had been disfigured in a botched effort at conservation. The evidence was stashed in the bowels of the museum, and after a suitable period of mourning, the true Leonardo would be replaced with a copy.
The Louvre is the largest museum in the world and an enormous labyrinth, covering some forty-nine acres. It is three times the size of the Vatican including St. Peter's Basilica, and its length is equivalent to two Eiffel Towers laid end to end. Rue de Rivoli is on one side, the River Seine on the other. Tourists roaming its halls with Karl Baedeker's Paris and Its Environs igio would read that the picture galleries displayed three thousand paintings, including multiple Rembrandts, Raphaels, Titians, and six of the thirteen easel paintings by Leonardo da Vinci.
Searching the entire museum complex consumed an army of inspectors and gendarmes. They were combing every gallery, storage room, stairwell, and closet, even the vast underground vaults, filled with discarded splendors and fashioned from the caves of the ancient wolf hunters who gave the Louvre its name.∗4 The search was proceeding meticulously, room by room, floor by floor.
Prefect Lépine vowed that if Mona Lisa were lost in the Louvre, his men would find her. Privately, though, he believed she was long gone. If the thieves had not used any of the exits, there was another possibility. A scaffold had been erected on the side of the museum where the first elevator was being installed. Although scrambling down scaffolding might not be the most ladylike means of egress, it offered an unguarded escape route.
3
FORTY-EIGHT HOURS AFTER Mona Lisa's absence was reported, there was still no demand for payment. If she was not a prisoner being held for ransom, the Paris picture magazine L'Illustration demanded to know, “What audacious criminal, what mystifier, what maniac collector, what insane lover, has committed this abduction? And where is the present abode of this marvelous picture?”
Paris had more newspapers than any other city in the world, and at least as many theories. In the pages of the Paris press, the crime was condemned as an assault, a scandal, and an act of anarchy. The papers kept the story alive in the public imagination and the pressure on the police. They prodded the investigators, excoriated the museum administration and the government, and concocted their own outlandish scenarios.
The New York Times reported from Paris: “Feeling here about the affair is intense. An extraordinary number of absurd theories are advanced.” Mona Lisa was stashed in the Louvre as a practical joke, to make a point, or to hide a blunder. She had been kidnapped by a madman. She had eloped with a desperate lover.
Reporters canvassed the opinions of art dealers and museum directors in France, England, and the United States. All gave the same answer. The painting was too famous to ever be sold on the art market for any price. No intelligent thief would take such a risk for a work he could never sell. But what if the thief did not intend to sell the painting?
An intriguing answer came from Joseph Reinach, a member of les Amis du Louvre. Paris in 1911 was both the incubator of a radical new art and a collectors’ market for masterworks. Acquisitiveness and its offspring, forgery, were unrestrained. American magnates with a lust for old masters were competing with museums to buy the best art of Europe—and they were winning so often that a group of wealthy Frenchmen had organized the Friends of the Louvre to stanch the flow.
In an interview in Le Temps, Reinach said:
There are a great number of ancient, or alleged ancient, copies of la Joconde. I imagine that one or another of these copies has fallen into the hands of the authors of the theft. What would happen? Some weeks or some months from now, they will send to the Louvre the copy supposed to be the original, or they will even return the original, as the conservators of the Louvre could not be deceived a single instant by the most perfect copy. But they would sell the copy to the American millionaire collector, less skilled than the conservators, explaining that the picture they have for sale is the original and that the Louvre only possesses a copy.
Paris newspapers were highly partisan. So many were owned or operated by political groups that a distinction was drawn between “journals of opinion” and “journals of information.” On both left and right, ther
e was a suspicion that the balance of power in Europe had upset Mona Lisa from her secure spot in the Louvre.
Germany under the militaristic Kaiser Wilhelm II was expanding its navy, challenging Britannia's rule of the waves, and playing political chess in the Mediterranean, threatening French control of Morocco. Since July i, when the German gunboat Panther reached the Moroccan port of Agadir, France and Germany had been edging toward war. It was a dangerous time for provocative games. The major European nations were bound by close alliances that compelled a collective response—Italy, Germany, and Austria in the Triple Alliance; France, Britain, and Russia in the Triple Entente. A threat to one was a threat to all.
Mona Lisa's disappearance was a conveniently timed distraction. “The news … has caused such a sensation that Parisians for the time being have forgotten the rumors of war,” The New York Times reported.
Opposition parties suspected that the government had faked the theft to divert attention from the war threat. The timing seemed too perfect to be coincidence. The story was monopolizing the headlines, allowing time for tempers to cool and war to be postponed. An American in Paris, well connected in art circles, wrote home to his son: “One ingenious French friend told me confidentially that Mona Lisa was not stolen but it was an arrangement to serve as a new sensation for the public and press to divert attention from the German war scare and that the painting in time would turn up safe and sound.”
Every political persuasion had a scenario. Nationalists suspected that Kaiser Wilhelm and his government had abducted a national treasure to humiliate France. Pro-Germans countered that the devious French had faked the theft not to distract from the war threat but to rouse sentiment against the kaiser.
When police in Bordeaux arrested a young German who matched the description of Mona Lisa's suitor, Germany lodged an official protest. The suspect had not been anywhere near Paris on August 21, and he was released within twenty-four hours. By then a second police incident was ruffling Franco-German relations. Acting on a report from detectives in Cherbourg, Prefect Lépine cabled New York that Mona Lisa was arriving in the United States on the North German Lloyd liner Kaiser Wilhelm II.
I
Saturday, August 26
EVERYONE HAD A THEORY, but no one had a clue.
Lépine was leaning toward the idea that a ring of expert art thieves was behind the abduction. The operation was too slick to be the work of a lovesick psychotic, a common crook, or any gang of amateurs, and it was too difficult for a single thief. Once Mona Lisa was removed from her frames, anyone could carry her easily, but with her double frames and protective glass, she weighed eighty-seven pounds (thirty-five kilograms).∗5 Only a Goliath could have lifted her off the wall and maneuvered her to the stairway without accomplices.
Lépine appealed to the public for information on anyone seen in the vicinity of the Louvre on the morning of August 21. The response was overwhelming. Thousands sent letters or appeared in person at police precincts and newspaper offices to offer information, tips, or their own theories. If they had shown up in deerstalker hats and plaid cloaks, the desk sergeants and editors would not have been surprised.
Stories of brilliant amateur sleuths who solved cases that stumped the police were making detective fiction a popular new genre, and such favorite British series as Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes and G. K. Chesterton's Father Brown appeared regularly in French translation. When Mona Lisa vanished, everyone in France, it seemed, not just Alphonse Bertillon, became a Sherlock Holmes.
The public appeal produced few reliable clues but no shortage of cranks, nuts, and notoriety seekers. A University of London professor, whom the British press dismissed as an ornery iconoclast, railed that the stolen work was “one of the most actively evil pictures ever painted—the embodiment of all evil the painter could imagine put into the most attractive form he could devise.”
A Sorbonne psychology professor warned in Le Temps that the thief might be a sexual psychopath who would treat Mona Lisa with “sadistic violence and fetishistic tendresse,” take pleasure in “mutilating, stabbing and defiling” her, then return her when he was “through with her.”
In Le Figaro, a historical novelist named Maurice Strauss fingered the infamous art thief Adam Worth, who had stolen Gainsborough's Duchess of Devonshire in 1876. “He has taken up the game again at our expense. The theft of la Joconde bears his signature,” Strauss wrote. “There is only one man in the world who would have acted with such tranquil audacity and so much dexterity. It was Worth.” The police were intrigued. Because the Gainsborough had eventually been recovered in America, U.S. customs officers increased security on the northern border, anticipating that Mona Lisa might be smuggled through Canada. There was one sticking point. Adam Worth had been dead for nine years.
Numerous letter writers claiming second sight recounted bizarre dreams that revealed where the painting was hidden. Le Matin enlisted two clairvoyants in the hunt and promised a reward “to anyone who by somnambulism, spiritualism or other occult means indicates the identity of the thief or the whereabouts of Mona Lisa.” Gazing into her crystal ball, Madame Elise prophesied that the seductress had come to no good end—Mona Lisa had been destroyed. Madame Albanda da Silva, after studying the position of the planets at the time of the theft, swore that the painting was still in the Louvre, and she described the abductor as looking strangely like a bird, with a voice like a crow's, dark hair as fine as feathers, and an ostrich neck.
Tips poured in from all parts of Europe. Sûreté detectives were in Belgium following a tip that Mona Lisa was concealed in a freight train passing through Namur, Liege, and Brussels, en route to Holland. In Leon, two foreigners were arrested after the lady was discovered in their luggage. The men protested their innocence. They were tourists who had bought a copy of the missing painting as a souvenir. In Italy, a valuable Mona Lisa copy, painted during Leonardo's lifetime, was stolen from a luxurious villa on Lake Como.
In Calais, a slight, edgy man with a black mustache waxed at the tips took the Channel packet to Dover. He arrived in London, carrying all his worldly goods in a small-to medium-sized white wooden case, twenty-four by thirty-five inches, and appeared without an appointment at the Bond Street showroom of Duveen Brothers.
At a time when European art dealers were earning fortunes building collections for American tycoons, none were more powerful or successful than the Duveens. Brothers Joseph and Henry had a third clandestine partner, Bernard Berenson. A connoisseur and cultural snob, Berenson was a tiny man with a “tremendous excess of the ‘I.’”∗6 In his ambition to cultivate elegance and wealth, he acquired a Brahmin wife, the villa I Tatti in Florence, and a secret paymaster. For thirty years, Berenson was on the Duveens’ books. The connoisseur and the dealers detested one another and made one another wealthy, profiting enormously from an alliance based on mutual greed and mistrust. As a team, no art brokers rivaled them. Duveen Brothers had offices in London, New York, and Paris. Profits were as high as 75 percent. In 1909 the Paris office alone realized $13 million (more than $290 million today).
Henry Duveen was in the Bond Street showroom when the stranger came in and insisted on seeing him alone and at once on “a very important matter.” Duveen was immediately wary. He did not like the look of the man.
“Will you give me your word of honor that you will never reveal what I am going to tell you?” the man asked.
“Of course, of course,” Duveen answered.
The dealer's brusqueness seemed to unnerve the man, and sidling closer, he whispered a warning. “If you don't, I and my friends will know how to deal with you. I have the Gioconda here in London. Will you buy it?”
The art broker was speechless. This stranger—“a seedy-looking foreigner,” in Duveen's eyes—was the man police on three continents were hunting.
“Well, what do you say? What figure will you give me?” the man demanded.
The Duveens had not become wealthy by being scrupulous. In the business of
buying and selling art, a dubious provenance was no deterrence, but Henry Duveen wanted no part in such a sensational, highly publicized affair as the Mona Lisa heist. He did the first thing he could think of. He laughed as if he did not believe the story and walked away.
The stranger, dismissed so rudely in London, crossed the Channel again and made his way from Calais to northern Italy, where the American millionaire collector J. Pierpont Morgan was vacationing.
2
AMERICAN PORTS WERE ON HIGH ALERT. Customs officers, Pinkerton detectives, and Treasury Department agents were boarding every incoming ship that had made a port of call in France. In New York Harbor, they had searched the Oceanic, arriving from Southampton via Cherbourg with seven hundred passengers, and the Provence, which had departed from Le Havre.
Kaiser Wilhelm II was due to arrive in New York shortly. It had set out from Bremen, also making stops at Southampton and Cherbourg. Two suspects were listed on the ship's manifest. One was a New Yorker who embarked in Cherbourg, accompanied by a small, dark man. They were carrying two framed canvases with a wooden panel painting sequestered between them. French police had boarded the ship. The small man turned out to be a porter; the other was an American artist from the West Side of Manhattan. Although the paintings appeared to be his own compositions, the artist remained under suspicion.
The second suspect was a wealthy American dealer and collector. His presence in Paris when the picture was stolen might have been coincidental, but he was a close student of Mona Lisa, and French police had kept him under surveillance since the theft.
When the Kaiser Wilhelm II docked in New York, customs officers went over the ship from stem to stern and inspected every piece of luggage. There was no trace of either Mona Lisa or the suspicious dealer-collector, but the investigation raised a new alarm in France: Was Mona Lisa smiling on an American millionaire?
