Vanished Smile

by R. A. Scotti

  With these few exceptions, scant notice was taken of Mona Lisa until Napoleon arrived on the scene. By then the Louvre was in its third incarnation. The fortress turned royal palace was reconfigured as a museum during the Revolution. The idea of a public showcase to display the royal collection originated with Louis XVI. The ambitious plan seemed fitting for the birthplace of the Enlightenment, but the Revolution intervened.

  The sans culottes seized the idea as they seized the royal family. The revolutionaries would accomplish what three hundred years of Valois and Bourbons had failed to do: complete the Louvre palace and give the king's collection to the people. The change from palace to public space was a revolutionary act and an inspired public relations coup, if somewhat late in coming. Royal collections in Austria and Germany, the Vatican, the Quirinale Palace in Rome,∗9 the Escorial in Madrid, and the Hermitage in St. Petersburg had already opened their doors to the public, although visitors to the Hermitage had to arrive in full dress because they were entering the czar's house.

  To flaunt the superiority of the new order, the Louvre—renamed the Musée Frangais—opened on August 10, 1793, the first anniversary of the fall of the monarchy. Although only a portion of the royal collection had reached the galleries, the museum was such a popular attraction that prostitutes staked out the entrances. Though not the first national museum, the Louvre became the prototype. By the close of the nineteenth century, every major Western capital had a public art museum, and the idea was spreading to other cities in Europe and the United States. Public museums were egalitarian in name only. They were elite institutions operated by the discriminating for the discerning.

  Mona Lisa was one of the last works in the royal collection to move from Versailles to the Louvre, and she did not remain there long. Shortly after she arrived in Paris, Napoleon Bonaparte became the first emperor of the French and fell captive to her smile. When he retired Josephine and married the nubile Marie-Louise of Austria in the Salon Carré to secure an heir and an alliance, his eyes may have been on Madame Lisa. He transported her to his bedroom in the Tuileries Palace along with his new bride, and he maintained her there until his defeat at Waterloo in 1815.

  7

  NAPOLEON BONAPARTE WAS the most notorious art thief in history. Such latter-day looters as Lord Elgin and Hermann Goring pale beside the Corsican plunderer. Napoleon charged across the Continent, conquering land and confiscating art∗10 When Pope Pius VI protested the wholesale looting, Napoleon took him prisoner and emptied the Vatican museums and libraries. The pillage was planned as carefully as the military campaigns. Dominique-Vivant Denon, an artist and archaeologist, accompanied Napoleon on his first Egyptian expedition and began the first serious study of Egyptology. Denon became Napoleon's museum director and assembled a squad of scholars consisting of a mathematician, a chemist, a botanist, two painters, a sculptor, and an archaeologist, who rode with the troops to choose the finest works of art and science. The soldiers called Denon “I'oeil de I'armee”—the eye of the army.

  In the Vatican, the emperor's armies seized five hundred paintings, the Laocoön; the Apollo Belvedere; rare first editions, beautifully lettered on parchment and bound in silk with silver clasps; illuminated manuscripts of Petrarch and Ovid in Latin and Greek; Galileo's handwritten works; and exotic beasts from the papal zoo. In Venice, they commandeered the horses from the Basilica of San Marco and stole Veronese's Wedding Feast at Cana from the wall of San Giorgio, slicing it in half to fit it in their oxcarts. In Milan, they scooped up all the pages of the da Vinci notebooks in the Ambrosiana Library—fourteen volumes of drawings and writings, all in Leonardo's mirror script. Francesco Melzi had carefully preserved and cataloged the notebooks, but after he died in 15 70, his son and heirs treated the papers cavalierly. The notebooks were divided, pages were torn out and sold, and various codices ended up in Windsor, Madrid, and Milan.

  Transporting Napoleon's loot was an enormous undertaking. Canvases were rolled and secured in wax cylinders. Sculpture was packed in straw, then encased in plaster. Special cages were built for the wild animals. The Napoleonic panoply traveled by land, sea, and river barge on its triumphant journey to Paris. One hundred twenty buffalo and sixty long-horned oxen pulled the train of custom-built carts from various points in Italy to the port of Livorno on the western coast.

  A letter from 1798, so laudatory that Napoleon could have dictated it, described the awe in Livorno when the cavalcade reached the port:

  The whole town came out to greet the convoy, everyone was amazed by the power of a nation which, four hundred leagues from its native soil… had managed to transport such a large and precious cargo across the Apennines from Rome [sic] in order to decorate the capital of its empire. What a nation, this France, they said. So impressed were they that they called her ‘THE NATION,’ as if she were the only one on earth deserving the title.

  Sailing from Livorno, ships loaded with the imperial plunder dodged English frigates and weathered stormy seas on the short route to Marseilles. From there, the convoy continued by barge up the Rhone, following the rivers of France north to Paris. In the capital, periodic reports on the progress of the journey heightened anticipation.

  The third and grandest convoy from Napoleon's Italian Expeditions, this was the most magnificent cavalcade of art ever assembled. It reached the banks of the Seine on the morning of July 27, 1798. Its destination was the Louvre, to be renamed Musée Napoleon. The half-empty galleries soon filled with the emperor's plunder. One visitor, marveling at the quantity of masterworks, called the Louvre “this great cavern of stolen goods.”

  In one of history's choice ironies, Napoleon's wholesale ravishment of the art of Italy led to the rediscovery of the Renaissance wonder. Shortly after the booty reached Paris, the process of rediscovering and preserving the art and science of Leonardo began. In his villa in Lombardy, Melzi had cataloged the pages and compiled Leonardo's thoughts on painting in a book he called Trattato delta Pittura, or Treatise on Painting. The book was published in Italy in 1651 and later in Germany and France, among other countries. Over the course of many years, it went into sixty-two printings in France alone, and so the da Vinci codices confiscated in Milan were of great interest to French scholars. Denon had established an excellent conservation workshop at the Louvre, and there, the enormous work of classifying, studying, copying, and publishing the notebooks began. In the mid-nineteenth century, the unknown Leonardo began to emerge from the voluminous pages. In his interesting study, Mona Lisa: The Picture and the Myth, Roy McMullen writes that over the next fifty years, no historical figure, with the possible exception of Jesus, received more attention than Leonardo da Vinci.

  8

  IN 1815, WITH NAPOLEON in exile on the Island of St. Helena, Mona Lisa returned to the Louvre. She had come through Enlightenment, Revolution, and Napoleonic heroics. Now on public view, no longer enjoyed by kings and emperors alone, she began attracting the extravagant praise of connoisseurs. Mona Lisa came to epitomize the spirit of unabashed romanticism that was spreading through Europe. She was William Wordsworth's phantom of delight, a lovely apparition—the painting that came closest to perfection.∗11 In their Gallic effusiveness, the French Romantics made her incarnate. They took Vasari's “piu vita che la vivacità”—more alive than life itself—to heart and added moral ambivalence. She was sweetness and perfidy and the promise of a dangerous liaison. To come under her power was to be lost in “an infinite abyss.”†12

  The French historian Jules Michelet was the first to fall for “the gracious and smiling phantom.” “Beware, la Gioconda is a dangerous picture,” he warned. “The canvas attracts me, invades me, absorbs me; I go to it in spite of myself, like the bird to the serpent.” Mona Lisa madness became a family affair. Michelet's son-in-law, Alfred Dumesnil, author of Italian Art (published in 1854), saw in her “brilliant beauty” a dangerous temptress. “The smile is full of attraction, but it is the treacherous attraction. … This so soft a look, but avid like the sea, devours.
”

  If Michelet was smitten and Dumesnil chilled, Théophile Gautier lost his head completely. A critic, novelist, and bon vivant, Gautier became infatuated and recast the Louvre beauty as the eternal femme fatale: “If Don Juan had met Mona Lisa, he would have been saved writing on his list the names of three thousand women. He would have written but one, and the wings of his love would have refused to carry him further.”

  As other voices joined the impassioned chorus, Mona Lisa's reputation turned as dark as the varnish that clouds her image. Gautier's friend the author Arsene Houssaye succumbed to the Gioconda enchantment—to “this divinity of the chiaroscuro whose brown gaze holds chained at her feet all the generations of men … so perfidiously and deliriously womanly with six thousand years of experience behind her.” Assembling a team of gravediggers and clairvoyants, Houssaye went to Amboise, to the ruins of the Church of Saint Florentin where Leonardo was believed to be buried. They dug up a skull, but it was never verified as being human, let alone being Leonardo's. Although the “find” was dubious (it may well have been a cow's skull), Houssaye's words still resonate:

  [Mona Lisa] is true to life yet cannot be contemplated as if it were mere matter. As we stand before it, we feel as if alone on a mountaintop with a dizzying abyss at our feet into which we are about to fall, into which we do fall. It is the infinite abyss of a dream.

  Across the Channel, the critic John Ruskin scoffed at the Gallic effusions and deplored the lady who elicited them. “Leonardo,” Ruskin wrote, “depraved his inner instincts by caricature, and remained to the end of his days, a slave to an archaic smile.”

  To Mona Lisa's fervent lovers, Ruskin's derision dropped like a gauntlet, and a British Galahad charged into the fray. Walter Pater was a young Oxford don when he wrote the defense of Mona Lisa that made him famous. Not since Vasari had anyone written with more rapture:

  La Gioconda is, in the truest sense, Leonardo's masterpiece, the revealing instance of his mode of thought and work. … Perhaps of all ancient pictures time has chilled it least. … 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 Saint Anne the mother of Mary; and all this has been to her as the sound of lyres and flutes and lives only in the delicacy with which it has molded 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; and modern philosophy has conceived the idea of humanity as wrought upon by, and summing up in itself, all modes of thought and life. Certainly Lady Lisa might stand as the embodiment of the old fancy, the symbol of the modern idea.

  More an ardent love letter than measured art criticism, Pater's paean made Mona Lisa a love object to a generation of British public schoolboys. W. B. Yeats turned his words into a poem. Oscar Wilde said, “The picture becomes more wonderful to us than it really is and reveals to us a secret of which, in truth, it knows nothing.”

  While all the men around her were losing their heads, it took a woman to pierce Mona Lisa's singular attraction: “No one who has set eyes upon her for a moment can ever forget her,” George Sand wrote. “What is disquieting about this image is the soul shining through, appearing to contemplate yours with lofty serenity reading into your eyes while you vainly try to read into hers.”

  9

  HUNDREDS, IF NOT THOUSANDS, of books, articles, and academic careers were built on the twin puzzles of Mona Lisa's identity and her meaning, until a third all-consuming mystery made the old questions irrelevant: Was Mona Lisa lost forever?

  By the end of 1911, her trail was as cold as the North Sea in March. Investigators had chased tips from Paris to Bordeaux, Barcelona, Brussels, and New York, with forays to London, Madrid, Moscow, and Ghent. One lead after another evaporated. There were no new suspects, no fresh evidence.

  The world intruded. Dramatic new headlines pushed the caper off the front pages:

  THE UNSINKABLE TITANIC LOST

  ON HER MAIDEN VOYAGE

  SCOTT LOSES RACE TO POLE AND

  DIES IN THE ATTEMPT

  Without any fanfare, the blank space on the wall of the Salon Carré was filled by Raphael's portrait of Baldassare de Castiglione. It seemed a chivalrous choice. Castiglione was the author of The Book of the Courtier, a depiction of the ideal Renaissance prince, and in painting his portrait, Raphael was clearly influenced by the Mona Lisa he had seen on Leonardo's easel.

  After so many fruitless months, public sentiment had turned from shock to sorrow, indignation to frustration, embarrassment to derision. Chorus lines made up with the face of Mona Lisa danced topless in the cabarets of Paris. Entertainers at the popular nightclub Olympia mocked the failed efforts to recover the painting. Comedians asked, “Will the Eiffel Tower be next?”

  Fifteen months after her disappearance, France formally abandoned hope. In November 1912, a new deputy minister of fine arts, unscathed by the scandal,∗13 reported to the Chamber of Deputies: “There is no ground to hope that Mona Lisa will ever resume her place in the Louvre.” The investigation officially closed.

  When the new Louvre catalog was published in January 1913, la Joconde was no longer listed. Audaciously planned, meticulously plotted, and impeccably executed, the Mona Lisa heist seemed to be the perfect crime.

  ∗1 “Joyfully Anonymous.”

  ∗2 Charles Clement.

  ∗3 This was an old romantic notion, probably instigated by the French historian Jules Michelet, and embraced by the author Julius Verne and the Italian Romantic poet Enrico Panzacchi.

  ∗4 Charles V ruled an empire that made the Caesars look land-poor. At the peak of his power, it was twenty times larger than the Roman empire and comprised the Hapsburg kingdom of Austria; Germany, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands; Naples, Sicily, and Sardinia in Italy; Burgundy and Artois in France; Spain, Mexico, and Peru.

  ∗5 In 1625 Cassiano dal Pozzo wrote: “Note that his Lady, in other respects beautiful, is almost without eyebrows, which the painter has not recorded, as if she did not have them.” When Pozzo was writing, Mona Lisa had been varnished badly at least once, which could have erased her brows. An ongoing digital study suggests that she did have eyebrows once.

  ∗6 In January 2008, Reuters News Service reported that German scholars discovered a note in a book belonging to Agostino Vespucci, a city official in Florence. He must have been a punctilious bureaucrat, because he jotted in the margin of his collection of Cicero's letters that Leonardo da Vinci was working on a portrait of Lisa Gherardini del Giocondo, wife of a silk merchant, and he dated his note 1503.

  ∗7 Vasari.

  †8 Cassiano dal Pozzo was secretary to Francesco Cardinal Barberini, whose uncle was Pope Urban VIII. His description is in the Vatican Library.

  ∗9 Then the popes’ summer palace, later looted and confiscated by Napoleon.

  ∗10 Napoleon stole the best art, then set up museums in many of the cities he conquered, from Madrid to Milan.

  ∗11 Wordsworth owned a copy of Mona Lisa that was shown at the popular Manchester Exhibition of 1859. It was one of the first viewings of Mona Lisa in England. The origin and fate of the copy is something of a mystery.

  †12 Gautier.

  ∗13 The former minister, the beleaguered Henri-Étienne Dujardin-Beaumetz, had been forced to resign.

  A LETTER FROM LEONARDO

  PERUGGIA MUG SHOT

  The self-confessed thief, Vincenzo “Leonardo” Peruggia.(Courtesy of Roger-Viollet/Getty Images)

  PERUGGIA IN COURT

  Standing trial in Florence for the theft of Mona Lisa. (Courtesy of Roger-Viollet/Getty Images)

  I

  FLORENCE IS NEVER its best in extremes. In a city that celebrates civilization as restraint, winter is rarely the finest season. It swirls down from the boney Apennines and settles in the
bowl of the Arno River, creating an atmosphere as sullen and dejected as a Renaissance artist without a patron. The winter of 1913 would be the exception. Overnight, the mood of the city became euphoric, and the jubilation spread until the entire country was celebrating. No one was more surprised or delighted by the unexpected turn of events than Alfredo Geri, a dealer in art and antiques.

  With his substantial presence, Geri oozed prosperity. He had a stocky build with broad shoulders, a tenor's barrel chest, and a gold watch chain looping across an ample paunch—the expansive figure of a man who spent considerable time wining and dining his clients. His elegant shop on Via Borgo Ognissanti, a short stroll from the Ponte Vecchio, had an enviable clientele. Geri furnished the villas and palazzos of Florence with choice works. Among his favored customers were Eleonora Duse, whose shadowy stagecraft made Bernhardt appear histrionic, and her inamorato, the mercurial novelist and showman Gabriele d'Annunzio.

  Anticipating a busy Christmas season, Geri had placed an ad in a number of Italian newspapers, including Corriere della Sera and La Stampa, offering to pay generously for fine artwork. The response was considerable, and he spent several mornings sorting through the promising and the preposterous replies. There was always a handful of letters offering to part with family “treasures”—a favorite pet stuffed and moth-eaten or a rusted nail from the True Cross. One response stood out from the rest. Dated November 29, 1913, it was postmarked Poste Restante, Place de la Republique, Paris, and signed “Leonardo.” At first Geri dismissed the letter as either a prank or the delusion of an unhinged person. But something about it, the terse wording, the unsophisticated sentiment, the flourish of the signature—he could not pinpoint exactly what—kept nagging. Geri reread the letter several times: