Vanished Smile (8 page)

From the outset, problems had complicated the investigation. Given the Louvre's laissez-faire attitude toward security and record keeping, simply compiling a complete and accurate list of everyone with a Monday pass proved impossible. Even with the reduced staff, as many as eight hundred people could have been working in the museum or wandering through the galleries at any point on the day of the theft. The initial list given to the police contained only two hundred fifty-seven names.

Even more damaging to the investigation was the late start. By the time the police were alerted, the thieves had made a clean getaway. The Gare d'Orsay was just steps from the Louvre, and the port of Le Havre was within easy reach. With at least a twenty-four-hour head start, Mona Lisa could have crossed the border in any direction before she was missed.

Prefect Lépine continued to believe that a ring of skilled art thieves was behind the abduction, but he was no closer to flushing out the gang than he was on the first day, and he found the lack of a plausible motive baffling. As he said, “It is generally conceded that even a dull person would realize the impossibility of selling such a famous work.”

The
Paris Herald
expressed his frustration:

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)

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:

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:

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 offered, and the masses mourned.

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.