Vanished Smile

by R. A. Scotti

  When Decker's expose ran in the Saturday Evening Post, the Los Angeles Times called it “the most plausible explanation yet given of the strange theft from the Louvre of the Mona Lisa.” The article went on, “Whether this story is authentic or the product of a lively imagination (not, of course, the author's but he may have been imposed upon) would be difficult to check without a great deal more data than are given in the Post account, but it is a fine, romantic tale, which ought to be true if it isn't.”

  Karl Decker's trail is as cold as everything else about the case. He died intestate in New York City in 1941 and was cremated. He left no family or heirs except his wife, Maude, who was then living alone and in failing health in a small walk-up apartment without a telephone on West Seventy-fifth Street.

  In the mid-1940s, the novelist James M. Cain wanted to write a movie based on the Post article. He spent several years trying to track down information on Decker to acquire the rights, but he came up empty-handed. None of the magazines that had published Decker could help him, and his efforts to contact Maude Decker were unsuccessful.

  Whether fact or fiction, the Marques Eduardo de Valfierno was buried with Karl Decker. Only his alter ego lives on. Although he may have been nothing more than the kettle in which a reporter brewed a fanciful tale, today every list of history's legendary forgers includes the name Yves Chaudron.

  THE PRISONER

  MONA LISA'S CALLING CARD

  When Mona Lisa returned to the Louvre in January 1914, the museum printed this calling card, saying that Mona Lisa would once again be receiving visitors every day except Monday. (Courtesy of Roger-Viollet/Getty Images)

  I

  BEFORE AUGUST 21, 1911, Mona Lisa belonged to the realm of high art. After August 21, she became a staple of consumer culture. The pure beauty that Frangois I made his own, that Leonardo clung to and Raphael copied, that Louis XIV and Napoleon took into their bedrooms became fair game for advertisers, authors, pop stars, and promoters.

  Mona Lisa was spoofed for the first time in 1887, when she was pictured smoking a pipe. Since then many artists have parodied her or paid her homage, including Dali, Léger, Marisol, Rauschenberg, and Peter Max. Duchamp painted a beard and mustache on a cheap postcard reproduction of Mona Lisa and added the inscription LHOOQ (Elle a chaud au cut, She has a hot ass). Andy Warhol silk-screened multiple Mona Lisa images, giving her the media status of Marilyn Monroe and Jackie O.

  Nat King Cole, Bob Dylan, Elton John, Willie Nelson, even Britney Spears and hip-hop singer Slick Rick have sung about her. She has been fodder for science fiction and suspense writers from Ray Bradbury to Dan Brown, Star Trek to Doctor Who. Julia Roberts starred in Mona Lisa Smile. Looney Tunes made her a cartoon in Louvre Come Back to Me, and the Simpsons reduced her to a homophone, “Moanin' Lisa.”

  As the first mass masterpiece, she is a commodity like the Campbell Soup can. Insert a celebrity face over hers, and an instant ad or magazine cover is created. Jackie Kennedy, Golda Meir, Monica Lewinsky, Joseph Stalin, and Salvador Dali have all been Mona Lisa-ed.

  Yet her mystery persists. Sigmund Freud went off on a flight of psychoanalytic fancy to understand and interpret her. He theorized: “Leonardo was fascinated by the smile of Mona Lisa because it had awakened something in him which had slumbered in his soul for a long time, in all probability an old memory.” He suggested that Leonardo's “mother possessed that mysterious smile which he lost and which fascinated him so much when he found it again in the Florentine lady.”

  Others have read her smile as an expression of sweet perfidy, androgynous beauty, and desperate hope. It has been called “a deceitful mask,” “a veiled threat,” and the smirk of “a woman who has just dined off her husband.”∗1

  Although the truth could be as simple as aesthetic necessity—given the quality of dental hygiene in the 1500s, full smiles were far from comely—comparisons are made to “the strange smile of benign comprehension” that the Buddha wears, the “archaic smile” that animated ancient Grecian sculpture, and the Renaissance smile of Donatello's David.

  In recent years, a pair of researchers in Holland studied Mona Lisa's smile using an emotion-recognition software program. The face-tracking technology read Mona Lisa's expression as 83 percent happy, 9 percent disgusted, 6 percent fearful, 2 percent angry, and less than 1 percent neutral. No wonder she is inscrutable.

  Neurologists have analyzed her smile as the response of cranial nerve VII, which controls the facial muscles. According to studies made by a professor at Harvard University, Mona Lisa's smile appears and disappears depending on whether we gaze at her peripherally or directly, which may explain why she seems to catch us looking at her.

  The more that is said about her, the less seems certain. Every fresh study provokes more conjecture. One theory reduces her to a mathematical equation. The golden ratio and the significance of pi in Leonardo's work are the subject of earnest articles. Another theory alleges that Mona Lisa is a symbol of the Egyptian goddess Isis and encrypted in her image is the ancient secret of the Giza Pyramids. A computer scientist, juxtaposing Mona Lisa with Leonardo's self-portrait, surmises that she is the artist in drag.

  There are even more exotic interpretations. Squinting at Mona Lisa reveals an infinity of hidden faces behind the famous mask, one devotee claims. Squint some more and a human skull metamorphoses behind her left shoulder. Cover the left side of your face and she appears confident; cover the right side and she seems reticent. Gaze at her by candlelight while blinking rapidly and her smile changes, her face assumes different expressions. A Japanese forensics expert believes that by analyzing Mona Lisa's skeletal structure, he can accurately re-create her voice, which, he says, has a low register for a woman.

  2

  ON DECEMBER 14, 1962, forty-nine years to the day after she began her Italian tour, Mona Lisa went on the road again. Curators were afraid to let her leave the Louvre a second time, but General Charles de Gaulle was the president of France and André Malraux was his minister of culture. They were a formidable pair, both masters at generating publicity.

  With a $100-million insurance policy (approximately $608 million today), Mona Lisa sailed for the United States on the S.S. France. A police escort brought her to Le Havre, where the ship's captain was waiting on deck to welcome her. She had her own first-class cabin, with security guards in the cabin on one side and nervous Louvre curators and conservators in the cabin on the other. Outfitted in a custom-made 352-pound airtight, floatable, temperature-and-humidity-controlled container, constructed of steel alloy and padded with Styrofoam, she was the safest passenger on board the luxury liner.

  When she arrived in New York, the director of the National Gallery, John Walker, was waiting at the dock with a Secret Service contingent. They transported her to Washington in a modified ambulance padded with foam rubber. All traffic was blocked from entering the Holland and Baltimore Harbor tunnels when she rode through. Because any change from the conditions that Mona Lisa was accustomed to might damage her irrevocably, Walker modified the air-conditioning system in the National Gallery so that “the atmosphere of her temporary home simulated the very air she had breathed in Paris.”∗2

  Mona Lisa had come a long way from her days in Vincenzo Peruggia's closet. Her American visit occurred at a low point in U.S.-French relations. Against American wishes, de Gaulle was going outside of NATO to arm France. Nevertheless, President Kennedy welcomed the illustrious visitor with the honors usually reserved for a head of state. The guest list for her white-tie reception included the Supreme Court justices, the governor of every state, both houses of Congress, and the full diplomatic corps.

  When the National Gallery opened to the public, the line of visitors stretched down the Mall. Director Walker estimated that she was seen by more people “than had ever attended a football game, a prize fight, or a World Series. … Her visit caused an esthetic explosion in the minds of many of those who saw her…. This great painting started some impulse toward beauty in human bein
gs who had never felt that impulse before.” After her Washington performance, Mona Lisa moved to the Metropolitan Museum in New York for another sold-out month-long engagement.

  In 1974 she went on the road again. Mona Lisa flew for the first time, from Paris to Tokyo. To avoid any change in pressure during the flights, her aluminum travel case was fitted in a protective steel container. So many Japanese wanted to see her that each person was limited to a ten-second glimpse. Mona Lisa even had her own phone. Anyone in Japan could dial a special number, and she would answer, “Hi, my name is Lisa and I am known as the Gioconda.” From Tokyo, she went on to Moscow, where she was lionized again.

  3

  MONA LISA DOESN'T get around much anymore. France now has a law forbidding her from leaving the country. But six million people visit the Louvre each year, and it is safe to bet that just about every one of them stops in to see her. She has moved from her old spot in the Salon Carré to her own personal room in the Louvre, constructed at a price tag of $6.2 million and paid for by a Japanese television company. It is a virtual bunker.

  Mona Lisa is set in concrete behind two sheets of bulletproof triple-laminated, nonreflective glass, separated by nine and a half inches (twenty-five centimeters). Her own personal bodyguards protect her from a repeat of 1911. In her new home, climatic conditions are constantly monitored. Ultrasound equipment and silica gel inside the display case keep her comfortable at all times, maintaining her temperature at a constant 55 degrees Fahrenheit with 50 percent humidity. The space between the sheets of glass creates a thermal buffer that prevents the fluctuating temperature of the room from affecting the temperature inside the case.

  Once a year, Mona Lisa has a full checkup. In 1956 she was attacked twice—first with acid and then with a rock that was hurled through her protective glass, chipping her elbow. Like all old panel paintings, there are insect holes on her backside, but given her age, her adventures, and her popularity, she is in remarkably good shape. Her checkup is always scheduled in the spring, when the museum heating system is turned off and the outside temperature approximates her ideal levels of heat and humidity. A dozen curators, restoration and lab technicians, and some fifteen maintenance staff take part in the annual examination. Mona Lisa is removed from her display case and measured to see if her wood has expanded or contracted. While she is undressed, her display case is cleaned, and the silica gel is changed. She requires about twenty-six pounds of gel, which fill two oblong trays in the bottom of her case to regulate the moisture level.

  The lady who sat stuffed in the false bottom of a valise in a tenement apartment for two years is coddled and cosseted more than any queen. She has undergone virtually every test that technology has devised—radiography, emissiography, and many types of imaging: multispectral, microtopographical, high-resolution three-dimensional, and infrared.

  With all the tools of our high-tech age, Mona Lisa cannot be fathomed easily. She retains her unique power to drive otherwise rational men to unalloyed adoration, bitter denunciation, absurd conjecture, and audacious crime. Half a millennium after Leonardo painted her, Mona Lisa remains as she was to Baudelaire, a “mirror deep and dark.” Revered and reviled in equal measure, subjected to adulation and insult, she performs a remarkable feat, bridging the divide between high and low culture. She has been derided as a femme fatale, an art fetish, and the queen of kitsch, and she goes on smiling, a picture of contained serenity, her mysteries intact, her secrets secure.

  While she is art history's most enduring enigma, celebrity and mass communication have made her a tragic figure. After her theft, Mona Lisa was recovered physically but never spiritually. She was found and lost. Today Mona Lisa is seen by millions, yet unseen. For her own protection, “the most subtle homage that genius can pay to a human face” can never be contemplated again in a true light, free of the barricades.

  Away from the hordes of tourists and digital cameras, out of the display case and “in the flesh,” seen not in virtual reality but in the true reality of the painted panel, Mona Lisa enters the soul. This is the genius of Leonardo, lost since the theft created the icon.

  Behind her impenetrable bulletproof glass, in her multimillion-dollar digs in a hall once called the Salle des Etats, she hangs in splendid isolation, alone except for Frangois I, across the room in the Wedding Feast at Cana. It is bemusing and comforting to know that when the last camera has flashed and the last ogler has turned away, when the Louvre alarms are blinking and night falls over the mansard roofs of Paris, Frangois is still keeping a possessive eye on his Mona Lisa.

  ∗1 Lawrence Durrell, Justine.

  ∗2 John Walker, Self-Portrait with Donors.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  IN PURSUING Mona's Lisa's mysterious theft, I have been aided and abetted in many ways by many people. My valiant daughter, Francesca Chigounis, read, and reread, and reread the manuscript as if each time were a pleasure, not a penance, and with each reading, raised key questions and offered keen advice. My dauntless agent, F. Joseph Spieler, was a miracle worker at the outset, an unfailing source of encouragement and faith through the long slog, and a painstaking editor in the stretch. My astute and patient editor, Dan Frank, pushed me, kicking and screaming, to coherence. My thanks, also, to Doug Steel for his photographic wizardry, design skill, and abiding friendship; to Fran Bigman for steering the book through each step of the editorial process; to Maria Scotti Chapin, born on August 21, for leaving no word unchecked; to Evans Chigounis for tea and choice words; and to Wayne Furman and the Frederick Lewis Allen Room of the New York Public Library, my second home.

  NOTES

  Much of the information here is drawn from newspaper and magazine articles related to the theft and to the reports of the police investigation. I am also indebted to the fine authors who have gone before me, particularly. Jerome Coignard, Milton Esterow, Fernande Olivier, Charles Nicholl, Roy McMullen, and John Richardson.

  THE VANISHING ACT

  9 AN ELEGANT LATIN AMERICAN “MARQUéS”: Information on the Marques Eduard de Valfierno comes from Karl Decker, “How and Why the Mona Lisa Was Stolen,” Saturday Evening Post, June 25, 1932.

  25 PARIS WAS THE HUB FOR NEWS: Robert Desmond's Information Process and Windows on the World.

  THE HUNT

  34 THE FIRST TO FACE JUDGE DRIOUX: Jerome Coignard's On a Volé La Joconde.

  48 THE BOND STREET SHOWROOM OF DUVEEN BROTHERS: James H. Duveen, Art Treasures and Intrigue.

  49 A THIRD CLANDESTINE PARTNER: Joseph Duveen wrote of Bernard Berenson: “I advise caution as all are agreed that he will never play the second fiddle but must lead the band, if not conduct it. It could be dangerous to be out of step with him.”

  51 CHERCHEZ L'AMéRICAIN: Frederick Lewis Allen, The Great Pierpont Morgan.

  THE BLANK WALL

  65 THE RISE OF A POPULAR PRESS: Robert Desmond's Information Process and Windows on the World.

  70 THE FACES OF THE CROWDS WERE CHANGING: Henry T. Peck, The New Baedeker 1856-1914, Being Casual Notes of an Irresponsible Traveler.

  70 THE GRAND TOUR: Elizabeth I originated the idea of sending the young English lords who would inherit the realm on a “grand tour” of the Continent to acquire culture. Dr. Johnson was generally opposed to the practice, with one pragmatic exception: “Indeed, if a young man is wild and must run after women and bad company, it is better this should be done abroad, as, on his return, he can break off such connections and begin at home a new man.”

  72 A THIEF BRINGS US A STATUE: On the articles from the Paris-Journal and Le Matin in this section and the next, I have relied for the most part on the translations of Milton Esterow in The Art Stealers.

  NOT THE USUAL SUSPECTS

  85 “WE HAVE INFECTED THE PICTURES”: Pablo Picasso, Picasso on Art.

  87 BORN AMéLIE LANG: Fernande Olivier, Loving Picasso.

  89 “YOU COULD OWE MONEY FOR YEARS”: Picasso, Picasso on Art.

  89 LEO AND GERTRUDE STEIN: James R. Mellow's Charmed Circle, and Roger
Shattuck's The Banquet Years.

  90 APOLLINAIRE GREW INCREASINGLY ALARMED: Fernande Olivier, Picasso and His Friends.

  93 WHILE AWAITING MONA LISA: Milton Esterow, The Art Stealers.

  94 APOLLINAIRE WAS UNDER ARREST: Francis Steegmuller, Guillaume Apollinaire, Poet Among the Painters.

  98 THE LOUVRE THIEF: Since Honoré Joseph Géry Pieret was called variously Géry and Pieret, I refer to him as Géry for consistency.

  100 THE POET IN HANDCUFFS: Esterow, The Art Stealers.

  102 THE STUDIO PRESENTED A SCENE: Olivier, Picasso and His Friends.

  106 APOLLINAIRE WOULD RECALL SOMETIME LATER: Apollinaire, Apollinaire par luiMême.

  106 FERNANDE GAVE A DIFFERENT VERSION: Olivier, Picasso and His Friends.

  112 YEARS LATER, WHEN IT WAS SAFE: Picasso, Picasso on Art.

  112 FERNANDE PINPOINTED THE FATAL FLAW: Olivier, Picasso and His Friends.

  114 ON THE 31ST DAY OF AUGUST: Guillaume Apollinaire, Selected Poems.

  115 ANDRé BILLY, A WRITER: André Billy, Avec Apollinaire, Souvenirs Inédits.

  THE MYSTERY WOMAN

  126 BY 1503, ARTISTS WERE FLOCKING TO ROME: During Julius IPs papacy (1503-1513), he commissioned Michelangelo to sculpt a papal tomb (1505) and to paint the Sistine Chapel ceiling (1508), Bramante to build St. Peter's (1505), and Raphael to fresco the Stanze (1508).

  128 SHE IS A STRANGE PAINTING: Mona Lisa is variously interpreted as a reflection on man and nature, the one immortal, the other transitory, or a cosmic meditation. Leonardo saw the individual as a micro-cosmos and the elements of one as a metaphor for the other. The human skeleton corresponds to the earth and the pumping blood to moving water. The passions are fire, and the soul is the wind.