Vanished Smile

by R. A. Scotti

  At thirty-eight, Decker was a veteran of the rough-and-tumble newspaper wars of New York, and he considered his companion curiously. The Mona Lisa thief was in jail and the lost Leonardo was back in the Louvre, yet the marques seemed to be suggesting that the case was still not closed. With his leonine head raised to the sun, Valfierno exuded the well-being of a man who was immensely pleased with himself. They made a roguish pair—the journalist-adventurer on the beat of a frontpage story and the seasoned scam artist. Both were inveterate opportunists and exemplars of their professions.

  Built like a battleship and sporting an extravagant mustache and a trademark fedora with a brim the width of Texas, Decker personified the swashbuckling correspondent who never allowed the facts to stand in the way of a good story. Dubbed “a modern D'Artagnan” for his daring exploits in pursuit of front-page stories, he was as subtle as a banner headline and as inventive as his country. Decker's name made headlines almost as often as bylines. Like the Dumas musketeer, he dashed from escapade to exploit, breathlessly pursuing Hearst's “journalism of action”—rescuing a beautiful Cuban revolutionary from prison, embedding with the first landing force in the Spanish-American War, mapping an expedition to free the wrongfully accused Captain Alfred Dreyfus from Devil's Island.

  The debonair marques, every inch the gentleman thief, had patrician manners and no morals. A born aristocrat, he was the scion of a prominent family in Latin America, but if presented with a choice between an honest occupation and a clever scam, he would not suffer a moment of indecision. He was courtly, charming, and compulsively crooked.

  Valfierno had been operating beyond the law without interference on three continents for years. Occasionally, he was forced to leave a country sooner than planned, but there wasn't so much as a smudge on his record. His dossier was the only immaculate thing about him. The marques performed with blithe unscrupulousness. An amused contempt for what he called “the squirming hordes of saps in the world” and impeccable breeding gave him an aura of invincible superiority. Although he had worked many cons in his time, in these later years, he would not entertain any operation that promised less than a $50,000 profit, roughly $750,000 today.

  If you believe there is honor among thieves, then you can believe that a bargain was struck on that wintry day in Casablanca. Assured that his part would not be made public in his lifetime, and safely beyond the law, the Marques Eduardo de Valfierno confessed to a deception that he boasted was unparalleled “in insolence and ingenuity.”

  Perhaps like every artist, he wanted his work to be appreciated. Maybe he was in a reflective mood, or maybe with so many frauds on his conscience, he was moved to come clean—if not to purge his soul, then to satisfy his ego. Valfierno was old for the game, although he showed no inclination to retire. Whatever his motive, the marques knew that Karl Decker would appreciate the beauty of an artful swindle. Defenses lowered and tongues loosened, conversation flowed freely. With the pride of an artist admiring his masterwork, Valfierno revealed how and why Mona Lisa had vanished.

  2

  THE MARQUéS HAD a receptive audience in Karl Decker. A dozen years before, they had met in Buenos Aires, where Eduardo de Valfierno's legitimate name was so respected that it would open every door. Even though he was the youngest son in a society where the bulk of the inheritance went to the eldest, his patrimony offered unlimited opportunity. But he never used his true name, and he never revealed it in his various business ventures. Among his less nefarious interests, the marques was something of a connoisseur, and an opportune meeting with a French art restorer had led him into the highly fluid, often questionable fine-arts market.

  Yves Chaudron was described as a pale wisp of a Frenchman, almost a skeleton in his skinniness. He had begun his professional life as a painter, but lacking any creative instinct, he had drifted into art restoration, then into the considerably more profitable field of art falsification. It was a natural progression and his true calling. Few, if any, forgers could imitate art with greater mastery. Given a painting to be copied, Chaudron could capture the slightest quirks of the artist, duplicate the finest brushstrokes, and match even damaged colors. His skill was described as “the uncanny sort that breaks the heart of the collector.”

  Chaudron became the marques's partner in crime and his alter ego. Valfierno was the front, Chaudron the talent. Together, they “enriched the Argentine” with the works of the popular nineteenth-century painter Bartolome Murillo. Like Picasso, Murillo was Andalusian, but beyond a shared nationality, the two were antithetical. Murillo painted sweet Madonnas, hated by Picasso, loved by Latin widows.

  In those early days, the marques would start every morning with a stack of newspapers, circling each black cross that announced the death of a prosperous Argentinean. As a rule of thumb, the longer the obituary, the richer the deceased. Valfierno was, of course, the soul of tact when he approached a grieving widow. He would suggest that she buy a Murillo and donate it to the Church as a memorial to her dearly departed. It would be a rare and beautiful tribute. As fast as Chaudron could paint the fakes, Valfierno palmed them off. Soon they were turning out so many “genuine” Murillos that their operation became a factory.

  Chaudron had learned a number of tricks from his restoration work, and in their Buenos Aires plant, electric fans whirled on the freshly varnished canvases, breaking the surfaces into thousands of tiny cracks. Vacuum cleaners operated in reverse, blowing clouds of dust on the varnish. Chaudron and his assistants added finely ground coffee to the dust, sprinkling the grains over the canvases to reproduce the flyspecks that often deface old works.

  Although business was booming, the marques was always prowling for bigger game, and he began dabbling in finance. When a syndicate that he organized began to collapse, he left Buenos Aires expeditiously, taking an estimated quarter million dollars in gold bullion with him. Chaudron followed soon after, leaving the Argentine with more Murillos than cattle.

  Sometime later, Decker bumped into the pair again in Mexico. Although they were still working the Murillo market, they had a new and riskier operation. Instead of returning to the manufacture of paintings, they were selling the same celebrated work over and over to well-heeled tourists. The scam was transparent and successful. Buyers would be offered a famous Murillo that hung in a museum in Mexico City. Seeing it on the museum wall validated its authenticity. Buyers asked few questions, hoping ignorance would insulate them from whatever unsavory activity was involved, and they would return home to await delivery. In due course, the Murillo would arrive, along with a batch of newspaper clippings, all undated. A typical lead read: “Yesterday, an outrage occurred and a priceless Murillo was ripped from its frame. …” If a buyer returned to Mexico City and saw the original still in the museum, the marques would say that to avoid embarrassment, the museum was passing off a copy as the true work.

  While the money was easy, painting and peddling the same canvas grew boring. Valfierno was soon looking for a new source of income to finance his indulgent lifestyle, and Chaudron had grown nostalgic for his native France. Filthy with money, the partners sailed for Paris, where they insinuated themselves easily into the carnival that was the Parisian art world. For a few unrestrained years in the afterglow of the Belle Époque, the passion for collecting rivaled the Renaissance. Corots, Millets, and even Titians were being sold in Paris every year, many of them fakes.

  By 1911 the fleecing of American millionaires was a cottage industry in Europe. “All the great European fakers worked with an eye on the rich Americans. … The more fantastically untrue a story connected with a picture or work of art, the more likely it was to find an eager buyer among the flocks of rich Americans who vied with each other in buying the bed Queen Elizabeth (or Empress Josephine, or Cleopatra—or all three) had slept in.”∗

  Many towns boasted their own forger. In Siena, an art restorer named Icilio Federico Ioni manufactured original paintings from the Quattrocento. In Modena, a painter aptly named Malatesta produced Titian
s on demand. And in Paris, after years spent cranking out perfect Murillos, the adroit Yves Chaudron turned to a more lucrative Renaissance master.

  The marques and his master forger were at the right place at the right time with the right experience to hatch the most brazen art swindle ever attempted. They would sell Mona Lisa not once but six times. It was a classic sting, elegant in its simplicity. Chaudron would paint six Mona Lisas. Valfierno would steal the original and sell each forgery to a millionaire collector as the authentic Leonardo. Since she could never be shared or even acknowledged, each buyer would believe that he possessed the true Mona Lisa. The Mexican enterprise had been a virtual dry run—excellent training for their new and most remarkable coup.

  “In selling that famous Murillo sometimes several times a week,” the marques explained to Decker, “I learned of that queer quirk in the brain of the collector that will cause him to buy what he can never sell again, what he can never exhibit and what will have to be kept hidden at all times.”

  3

  A PERFECT CRIME, like a perfect cognac, should be swirled and savored, and with what Decker called “that strange quirk of vanity characteristic of the creative crook,” the marques recounted each step.

  In the initial stage, Yves Chaudron became a habitue of the Louvre, his easel set up openly in the Salon Carré. Because of museum policy, he could not make his copy the same size as the original. Unfazed, Chaudron began a smaller replica of the Mona Lisa. He possessed exquisite dexterity as a forger, and his copy was exact in every detail. Enlarged slightly, it became his template.

  While Chaudron painted in the Louvre, Valfierno traveled to Italy in search of an antique bed or armoire dating from around 1500. A headboard or the back panel of a chest, the wood seasoned by time and nature, was large enough to cut into six panels, measuring thirty-one-by-twenty-one-inches. Each would be a near-match to Leonardo's.

  After purchasing an armoire of the required age and size and cutting the panels, the conspirators chopped up the remains and fed them to a fire in Chaudron's studio. He was upset because they had destroyed a beautiful antique, but Valfierno laughed and assured his friend that in a few months, he could buy another armoire—or a hundred more, each older and more beautiful.

  In Paris, the marques established luxurious headquarters on the Left Bank and stocked the place with cases of Chambertin, Roederer Cristal, and Napoleon Courvoisier. Fine wines, vintage champagne, and the smoothest cognac, served in Baccarat crystal, were necessary lubricants. While Valfierno prepared his seduction, Chaudron primed the panels to seal the wood. He undoubtedly followed the typical Renaissance procedure, first covering the bare wood with two successive layers of gesso and leaving it to dry. Depending on the weather, that would take at least two days. When the gesso dried, he applied a thick coating of white lead to form a binder between the panel and the paints. Without a binder, the wood would absorb the oil-based colors. When the panels dried, he went over each one with a pumice stone, sanding it until it was as smooth as a block of ice.

  Often called “the second oldest profession,” art forgery dates at least to the Roman Empire, when Athenian sculptors incised the signatures of Phidias and Praxiteles on their own inferior works, then sold them to their Roman conquerors as originals. The ancient Greeks never signed their sculpture, but the rubes from Rome did not know that. While forgery continued on a modest scale through the Renaissance when Ghiberti and Michelangelo created their own fake antiquities, the ancient profession reached pandemic levels only when American magnates entered the market. Renaissance paintings were the most speculative, the most desired, and the most frequently faked.

  Forging is itself a fine art, and quality runs from crude imitation to near-flawless likeness. To fake the most famous face in art history was both daring and daunting. It required extraordinary precision and technical accuracy. A master like Chaudron would consult the best sources from Leonardo's time to learn which materials were available to him. Chaudron's bible would have been I l Libra dell’ Arte, by Cennino Cennini. It was the authoritative source on the techniques and materials used by Renaissance and pre-Renaissance artists.

  Chaudron would never make an obvious mistake, such as using cobalt blue, Chinese white, or cadmium yellow, paints popular in 1911 but not available in the 1500s. He would have mixed his own paints according to Renaissance formulas. Mona Lisa's true colors were probably never vivid, but they were clearer and brighter than the now muddy shades. Age, humidity, numerous varnishings, and botched conservation attempts had distorted Leonardo's palette, grays and greens turning to brown and blues to green. Chaudron had to compensate accordingly.

  Although Leonardo's original colors can only be guessed, he probably used walnut oil as a base and had Verona green, lapis lazuli, red ocher, vermilion, and burnt umber on his palette. He may have added a trace of the vermilion directly to the white lead base coat to enhance Mona Lisa's skin tone. He also may have applied fine layers of burnt umber directly onto the undercoat to create shadows.

  Color was only one of many challenges Mona Lisa presented to a forger. Leonardo did not mix his paints on a palette. He applied each one directly to the panel, painting the thinnest layers of color, one on top of the other, and achieving effects of great delicacy, blurring the edges particularly around the corners of the eyes and mouth. Mona Lisa is softly seductive, not an overtly provocative painted lady of the night, all hard edges and bold come-ons. She is ephemeral in her charms, perceived through the gentle play of shadow and light, and like a shadow, slipping away when you think your grasp is firm.

  Blending color and glazes through multiple layers, so thin that they are almost transLucént, gives Mona Lisa her unique aura. It creates the blurred sfumato effect, as if she is seen through a fine mist or a haze of smoke. Leonardo's brushstrokes are imperceptible, and his shades meld. Even in the landscape behind her, there are no distinct changes in color. The absence of defined edges to follow was a further test of Chaudron's skill.

  Once the image was replicated, he had to force the paint to crack to mimic the fissures that mar the painting's surface. According to recent scientific studies, craquelure has various causes. That detailed technical information was not known in 1911, and Chaudron probably falsified the defect called premature craquelure caused by the way the artist layered the paint. If Chaudron applied a color with a low oil content over an oilier one, the upper layer of paint would dry before the under layer, causing the surface to crack. Or he might have ereated the craquelure with a needle, scratching a web of lines in the outer layer of varnish, then rubbing dirt into the cracks with a pad of cotton wool. Finally, a forger of Chaudron's quality would not neglect the back. Using a fine drill, he would simulate the damage caused by insects. Woodworms feast on old panel paintings, tunneling into the backs because they do not like paint.

  No artist can reproduce every line, every shadow, and every dimension of a painting. There will always be small deviations that may not affect the general appearance but are undeniable. If the best forgery is placed beside the original, an expert may spot the differences. Further investigation would reveal the fraud. But Chaudron's Mona Lisas would never be seen with Leonardo's. That was the beauty of the game. Doubt was eliminated. No comparison would ever be made or even believed possible, because each buyer would be convinced that he possessed the one true da Vinci. It was more than a perfect crime, the marques boasted; it was a service to mankind.

  “I shall always contend that a forged painting so cleverly executed as to puzzle experts is as valuable an addition to the art wealth of the world as the original,” he told Decker. “If the beauty is there in the picture, why cavil at the method by which it was obtained.”

  4

  GIVEN THE COMPLEXITY of the enterprise, Chaudron painted quickly. When the paint dried on each new work, the marques sailed to the States. To avoid arousing suspicion, he made six separate trips over the span of a year. On each crossing, he carried a new Mona Lisa in his Vuitton luggage. Reproducti
ons of masterworks had become commonplace, and each time he declared his cargo and passed through New York customs without incident.

  By early summer 1911, the sting was set. The six forgeries were stashed safely in a New York bank vault and ready for sale, each with a price tag roughly equivalent to $15 million today. The six sheep were lined up to be fleeced. Only one step remained. Mona Lisa had to vanish from the Louvre.

  For this final detail, Valfierno needed someone with inside knowledge of the museum, and he recruited Vincenzo “Leonardo” Peruggia. Peruggia was an artisan, possessing precise knowledge and craft. Since he had been employed by the Louvre, he was both familiar with the museum and a familiar presence to the guards, and since he had built the glass box frame for Mona Lisa, he could remove the painting easily. He, in turn, recruited two accomplices, the Lancelotti brothers.

  Valfierno had begun wooing Peruggia while he was working as a framer at the Louvre, and they rehearsed every detail of the operation numerous times over a period of weeks and months. The marques provided a master key, a map of the museum, and more francs than Peruggia had ever imagined possessing in his lifetime—and that was only a first installment.

  As Valfierno related the story, late in the afternoon of Sunday, August 20, the three men visited the Louvre. One of them carried a brown paper parcel tied with string and containing the uniform of museum workers, three starched, knee-length white smocks. They lingered in the Salon Carré. The crowds were thin, and the guard was drowsy. By the four o'clock closing hour, the three had disappeared.

  As the museum emptied for the night, Peruggia led the men to a storage room between the Galerie d'Apollon and the Salle Duchâtel, where the copyists stored their supplies. Crouched in the darkness in the cramped closet, wedged among easels and paint boxes, the friends shared a hunk of cheese and a small flask of wine and waited for morning.