by R. A. Scotti
∗4 Loup + vivre, where wolves live.
∗5 One quarter-inch protecting glass: twenty kg; box frame: two kg; gilded frame: five kg; painting: eight kg.
∗6 Leo Stein.
∗7 Arabella Huntington.
∗8 This visit occurred before the painting was placed in a boxed frame.
† Bookman magazine, 1911.
THE BLANK WALL
When the Louvre reopened a week after
Mona Lisa vanished, a record number of visitors came
to the museum to view the empty space.
(Courtesy of Mary Evans Picture Library)
The leading political cartoonist in France, an artist who signed
himself “Orens,” satirized l'Affaire de La Joconde. A painter is copying
the empty pegs where Mona Lisa once hung for an American collector,
while the chicken wire over the remaining paintings, the elderly guard,
and the little dog mock the new Louvre security measures.
(Courtesy of Musée de la Carte Postale, Antibes, France)
I
MONA LISA BECAME the most wanted woman in the world. Eleven years after Guglielmo Marconi sent the first wireless message from England to Newfoundland, her story was flying around the world. L'Illustration wrote, “The entire world shares the stupefaction of Paris over Mona Lisa's disappearance.” Each new development—and each disappointment—in the unfolding case made news. To a significant extent, the rise of a popular press with the power to direct public opinion drove the case, influencing and at times impeding the police investigation.∗1
Between 1890 and 1914, newspaper readership nearly tripled. More people could read because elementary education had become mandatory, and more people wanted to read because the newspapers had become more appealing. This was the golden age of popular journalism, when wars were reported as glorious adventures and crimes of passion were rewritten as Romeo and Juliet romances with a salaciously sinister edge. The boom was born in America in the 1880s, when William Randolph Hearst, Jr., the youthful publisher of the San Francisco Chronicle, moved east to compete in the huge New York market for influence and readers. Soon Hearst's New York Journal was taking on the New York World, flagship of the reigning media king Joseph Pulitzer. In the newspaper wars they waged, competition was cutthroat, facts were incidental, and boundaries of truth and taste were trampled. The goal was to form, more than inform, public opinion. Sensational stories sold papers—the more sensational, the higher the circulation.
The technologies of the emerging age—photo reproduction and Marconi's wireless—propelled the story of the vanished Mona Lisa far beyond the country's borders. Print journalism had always been all type, no pictures.∗2 The development of commercial photography, beginning around 1880, changed that. Photogravure and other mechanical printing techniques replaced the laborious, time-consuming process of engraving and lithography, opening visual culture to mass consumption.
When Le Petit Parisien introduced illustrated supplements in France in the 1880s, circulation jumped. Now with more than a million readers, it claimed to be the largest daily newspaper in the world—and it was just one of a dozen major dailies in Paris with a national circulation. Where it had taken thousands of extravagant words to describe a single picture, almost overnight, a picture became worth a thousand words. As photography developed into a popular medium, illustrated books, calendars, and billboards proliferated, and pictures became a common household accessory. Sunday editions capitalized on the popularity of illustrations, adding funny papers and picture inserts.
Luigi Calamatta, a skilled artisan, spent twenty years, from 1837 to 1857, making the first exact engraving of Mona Lisa. Now, in a matter of days, her photograph was seen in every world capital. More people recognized Mona Lisa than the president of France. In New York, a Bloomingdale's ad offered: “Copies of the famous painting Mona Lisa or La Joconde, Da Vinci's masterpiece which mysteriously disappeared from its place in the Louvre Museum of Paris, now at Bloomingdale's Picture Store, 3rd floor, at 25 cents. Larger copies of Mona Lisa, exquisitely framed, at $9.98.”
NOT SO LONG BEFORE, Mona Lisa had been just another pretty face in the Louvre collection. Her estimated value was significantly less than many Raphaels, and works by Murillo, Correggio, Titian, and Veronese were copied twice as often. When nineteenth-century Romantics began to idealize her as a dangerously alluring femme fatale, the essential Eve, in all her innocence and intrigue, her fortune changed. To Renaissance artists, Mona Lisa represented an extraordinary technical achievement. To the Romantics, she posed a tantalizing psychological puzzle. The dichotomy of Madonna and whore, mother and temptress, seductress and seduced stirred the romantic imagination.
As her mystique deepened, many came to pay her court—passionate art historians, lovesick suitors, and ardent critics. They saw, in her eternal beauty, infinite depth and dangerous enchantment. Never has so much been read into so few inches.∗3 Mona Lisa's new fame quickly eclipsed every other work. In 1850 she was Number 1601 in the Louvre's catalog of paintings—one among many admired works in the collection. The 1878 Baedeker described her with some restraint as “the most celebrated work of Leonardo in the Louvre.” By 1910 Baedeker was calling her “the most celebrated female portrait in the world, the sphinx-like smile of which has exercised the wits of generations of poets and artists and still fascinates in spite of the darkened condition of the canvas [sic].”
Now global attention lifted her out of the museum, the preserve of the elite, and brought her to an audience that knew little or nothing about the Renaissance or its idiosyncratic genius. Leonardo had been a shameless self-promoter in life. In a letter of introduction to the Duke of Milan, the young da Vinci wrote:
I have sufficiently seen and examined the inventions of all those who count themselves makers and masters of instruments of war, and I have found that in degree and operation their machines are in no way different from those in common use. I, therefore, make bold, without ill-will to any, to offer my skills to Your Excellency, and to acquaint Your Lordship with my secrets, and will be glad to demonstrate effectively all these things, at whatever time may be convenient to you.
Four hundred years later, he was again the center of attention. His Mona Lisa had always exerted an extraordinary attraction on the titled and the talented. The theft and the sustained international attention made her a masterpiece for the masses—a phenomenon of a new popular culture, both persuasive and pervasive.
The painted lady who exerted such intriguing power over flesh-and-blood men was an instant international sensation. Hearst and Pulitzer had created news extravaganzas before, but the hoopla was for home consumption. Only wars had received such extensive worldwide coverage. Mona Lisa's disappearance was a global media event. L'Affaire de la Joconde combined beauty and loss, mystery and money, with hints of lust and romantic obsession. Millions of newspaper readers were beguiled.
James O'Brien, the San Francisco businessman, wrote home:
Paris is Mona Lisa crazy. When it was discovered that the famous painting was gone, the papers got out extras and there was more excitement about it than there was about the negotiations between France and Germany. … The newsboys looked upon me as a crazy person when I refused to buy their papers. I had suggested that I didn't even know Mona Lisa.
Like O'Brien, most newspaper readers had never been inside the Louvre or glimpsed the lost Leonardo. Now her face was as familiar as a friend's or lover's.
Newspapers in a dozen countries plumbed the mystery of her life and loves with unabashed poetic license. Mona Lisa was not the most glamorous face in France, but she was the biggest boost to circulation. Millions of readers who had never heard of her seven days before were glued to every installment of the missing person story.
The Renaissance masterwork became the people's painting—the lost love of the nation and the world. Obituaries were written for the elusive woman who had come to symbolize all women. Novenas and Masses were o
ffered, and the masses mourned.
2
PARISIANS HAD EXPECTED a swift recovery: the hoax exposed, a ransom quietly paid, the lady returned unharmed. Instead, the reopening of the Louvre became a national wake. On Tuesday morning, August 29, thousands of grieving Parisians lined up to view the blank space on the gallery wall. Le Figaro described it as “an enormous, horrific, gaping void” and reported that “the crowds didn't look at the other paintings. They contemplated at length the dusty space where the divine Mona Lisa had smiled the week before.”
A cordon of four gendarmes and six museum guards stood at attention as the mourners and the merely curious filed past the blank wall and paid their respects to the emptiness. Detectives in plainclothes mingled with the crowd. The darkened rectangle with the four vacant iron pegs became the empty casket of a missing person. The mourners left flowers and notes, wept, and set new attendance records. There had never been a wait to enter the Louvre. Now the lines stretched for blocks.
The capitals of Europe had long been the exclusive domain of upper-crust visitors, but the faces of the crowds were changing. The Cook's Tour was competing with the Grand Tour. Sorrowful Parisians, rubes from the provinces, and foreigners from many continents congregated outside the museum—émigré artists intent on revolution, unemployed “macaroni” with nothing better to do, Greeks and Turks side by side, eccentric British ladies of an uncertain age and young English lords touring the Continent, Cook's tourists from America seeing Paris for the first time, Negroes from Morocco, and Cossacks from the steppes of Russia, students from the low countries, and American tycoons in the market for prestige and paintings. The Paris Herald described it as “an invading crowd. All classes and conditions of men and women mounted the stairway like a crowd hurrying into a big railway station.”
Among those who stood in line to pay their respects were two young Germans, Max Brod and his friend Franz Kafka, both aspiring writers, on summer vacation. They had been to Zurich and Lugano and were ending in Paris. Traveling with little money had given them a bright idea. They would write a series of guidebooks—On the Cheap in Switzerland, On the Cheap in Paris. They imagined making their fortunes.
In Paris, they were swept up in the excitement of the lost Leonardo. She was nowhere in the Louvre, but she was everywhere else, smiling from kiosks, advertisements, and magazine covers. An avant-garde movie short, Nick Winter et le vol de la Joconde, spoofed the tumult over the theft. Kafka and Brod went to see the film.
In the five-minute slapstick comedy, the only clue is a shoe button. To follow the lead, Detective Nick Winter disguises himself as a shoeshine boy and forces everyone to submit to a polish. Between the chaos at the Louvre and the frenzied polishing, no one notices when the thief returns with Mona Lisa, then slips away again with a Velasquez. Everyone involved in the case is myopic, including the thief, but he is thoughtful enough to leave a note: “Sorry, blame my poor eyesight. I wanted the picture next to her.”
Mona Lisa's theft has been called the “perfect crime of the Modernist era”∗4 because it seemed to mirror the nihilism that would preoccupy the new century. Although the lost painting was a masterpiece of the Renaissance, the blank space conveyed the message of modern art—the void at the heart of Western civilization.
Thousands stood and gazed at nothingness, absorbing absence. They contemplated, in sorrow and seriousness, what was not there. In a way, it should have been a triumph for the young Turks of the new art. Instead, it was almost their downfall.
3
ON AUGUST 29, the day the museum opened its doors again, a “canary” began to sing. He did not chirp softly into the ear of Prefect Lépine or Magistrate Drioux but sang loudly and publicly to the editors of the Paris-Journal. It was not a random choice. Although several major newspapers were advertising rewards, the Paris-Journal offered the most generous money and a promise of anonymity. The Journal had an additional advantage: Its arts editor, André Salmon, was a friend of the informer.
As the Louvre reopened, the Paris-Journal devoted its front page to a startling confession.
A THIEF BRINGS US A STATUE STOLEN
FROM THE LOUVRE
CURATOR ADMITS THE PIECE IS
FROM THE MUSEUM.
AN EDIFYING STORY —OUR MUSEUM IS A SUPPLY
CENTER FOR UNSCRUPULOUS INDIVIDUALS
The arresting headline ran with an unusual note from the editors. It identified “The Thief” as “a young man, aged somewhere between twenty and twenty-five, very well mannered, with a certain American chic, whose face and look and behavior bespoke at once a kind heart and a certain lack of scruples.” In exchange for two hundred fifty francs ($1,000), the Thief sold the Journal a small statue he had filched from the museum and made a full confession, which the paper played verbatim on page one:
It was in March, 1907, that I entered the Louvre for the first time—a young man with time to kill and no money to spend. At that time, I had no idea of ever “working” in the museum.…
It was about 1 o'clock. I found myself in the gallery of Asiatic antiquities. A single guard was sitting motionless…. The place impressed me profoundly because of the deep silence and the absence of any human being. I walked through several adjoining rooms, stopping now and again in a dim corner to caress an ample neck or well-turned cheek.
It was at that moment that I suddenly realized how easy it would be to pick up and take away almost any object of moderate size.
The Thief went on to explain how he had chosen the head of a woman, concealed it under his vest, and walked out. He sold the statue to a Parisian painter-friend for fifty francs ($200), which he lost the same night in a billiard parlor.
“What of it?” I said to myself “All Phoenicia is there for the taking.”
The very next day I took a man's head with enormous ears—a detail that fascinated me. And three days later, a plaster fragment covered with hieroglyphs. A friend gave me twenty francs for this last. I stole it from the large room adjoining the Phoenician room.
Then I emigrated.
I made a little money in Mexico, and decided to return to France and form an art collection at very little expense. Last May 7th I… took the head of a woman, and stuffed it in my trousers.…
And now one of my colleagues has spoiled all my plans for a collection by making this hullabaloo in the painting department! I regret this exceedingly, for there is a strange, an almost voluptuous charm about stealing works of art, and I shall probably have to wait several years before resuming my activities.
4
THE NEXT DAY, Wednesday, August 30, the paper reported a second encounter with the Thief. The page-one report read:
We had a visit—a business visit this time—-from The Thief who, after pocketing the agreed ransom, handed us a sheet of paper on which he had written this amusing protest:
“To the Editor in Chief:
“In an age when the right of REPLY is universally recognized by the press, you will allow me a few words of protest against certain terms of abuse leveled at me in your issue of yesterday, relative to the theft of the Phoenician statuette. A professional thief, lacking all moral sense, would remain unaffected by them; but I am not without sensitivity, and the few pilferings I have engaged in have been caused by momentary ‘difficulties.’ Bourgeois society, which makes life so hard for anyone without funds, whatever his intellectual qualities, is responsible for these wanderings from the straight and narrow.”
The note was signed Baron Ignace d'Ormesan.
At the request of the newspaper, Louvre curator Bénédite examined the statue and confirmed that it was Louvre property. Only the attribution was false. The statue was Iberian, not Phoenician, as the Thief believed. It had been stolen from an exhibit of pre-Christian artifacts in the museum. Bénédite not only validated the statue's authenticity, he admitted that the Thief's story was probably accurate.
The recovered figure went on display in the window of the Paris-Journal, and hundreds jammed the newspaper off
ice to view the stolen art. L'Affaire des Statuettes was a huge coup for the paper. In Paris of 1911, there were virtually no subscriptions or home delivery. Since readers bought their newspapers each day from the corner kiosk, the most arresting headline or a continuing story that kept them coming back day after day for the next installment sold the most newspapers. L'Affaire des Statuettes had both.
The next day, the Paris-Journal flaunted its success with another page-one story:
The visitors to our windows exchanged many comments, and we shall spare the officials of the French Government any repetition of the litany of vigorous remarks addressed in their direction. So many cameras—both still and motion-picture—were aimed at the bust that the enigmatic Mona Lisa might almost have been jealous.
The Paris-Journal printed more papers than ever before, and the press runs sold out as soon as a new edition hit the street. The newspaper played the story to the hilt, jabbing the police and the government. On the road again, his pockets full of francs, the Thief continued his mischief-making, writing to the paper from various towns.
His next dispatch—headlined A PLEA FROM OUR THIEF TO HIS “COLLEAGUE”—was a mocking thank-you:
I do not want to leave France without once again sending you my thanks for the chivalrous manner in which you handled the little matter in which I was concerned. And I hope with all my heart that the Mona Lisa will be returned to you. I am not counting very heavily on such an event. However, let us hope that if its present possessor allows himself to be seduced by the thought of gain, he will confide in your newspaper, whose staff has displayed toward me such a praiseworthy degree of discretion and honor. I can only urge the person at present holding Vinci's masterpiece to place himself entirely in your hands. He has a colleague's word for it that your good faith is above all suspicion.
