- Antone Pierucci
- Posted On
This Week in History: Leonardo da Vinci and the Mona Lisa
This week we explore the story of Leonardo da Vinci and his enigmatic masterpiece, “The Mona Lisa.”
Leonardo’s best?
Seeing it in person for the first time, visitors usually remark on the portrait’s small size. Following the initial shock, they shuffle forward, shoulder-to-shoulder during the summer months when the whole world seems to be on vacation in Paris.
Craning of necks, gentle nudging of elbows and a quick look at the security guards flanking the thick-glass covered portrait, each visitor tries to get a closer look at that famous smile.
If Helen of Troy’s beauty is said to have launched a thousand ships, then Mona Lisa’s smile has launched an equal number of articles, books and movies. We are enamored. And by what, I admit I don’t know.
Maybe chalk it up to academic cowardice, but it seems that when a work of art has accumulated such universal accolades as the “Mona Lisa,” scholars are less willing to offer divergent opinions.
I have no such compunction. I don’t really like the “Mona Lisa” – at least it isn’t my favorite of Leonardo da Vinci’s paintings. He made quite a few portraits over his career.
His portrait of Cecilia Gallerani, for instance, shows the same masterful control of color gradations and life-like positioning as the “Mona Lisa,” with the added benefit of a touch of irony.
In her portrait, Cecilia holds an ermine, an animal that in the Renaissance was a symbol of purity. The joke is that Cecilia was the mistress to the Duke of Milan – a profession not quite so pure after all.
I at least have the weight of history behind me. Giorgio Vasari, da Vinci’s earliest biographer, devotes only a single line to the “Mona Lisa” when describing the great master’s life and works.
And although it became a treasured possession of French kings after Leonardo’s death, that was only by virtue of it being a work of da Vinci rather than any particular inherent quality of the portrait itself.
In reality, the craze over the “Mona Lisa” is a relatively modern phenomenon – one that owes its prominence to a deranged Italian nationalist who, on this day in 1911, conspired to steal the portrait for himself.
The Making of Madame Lisa
For such a famous painting, the subject matter itself is pretty mundane. Mona Lisa, which means Miss Lisa or Madame Lisa, was the wife of a well-to-do (but not extravagantly wealthy) Florentine merchant.
The family had just finished building a new house and wanted something to put on the walls. A portrait of Lisa would fit the bill perfectly.
When Leonardo da Vinci received the commission for the portrait in 1503 he had recently returned to Florence after an 18 year hiatus in Milan. During that interval, da Vinci had become a household name and kings, dukes and bankers vied for his services.
Lisa and her husband Francesco were over the moon to land an artist like da Vinci. That feeling started to fade as 1503 rolled into 1504 and then into 1505 and by 1506 they were anxious for the final piece.
But there was a hiccup. We don’t know why, but Leonardo never delivered the portrait to Lisa and Francesco. Conflicts between patrons and artists regarding payment were common in Renaissance Italy.
Leonardo especially had trouble (primarily because of his bad habit of not finishing works). In one case, litigations lasted over 20 years when he didn’t finish a painted altarpiece for a church in Milan.
When troubles like these arose, depending on how the courts decided, an artist could take the work in dispute and try to sell it elsewhere for a better price. This might be what happened with the “Mona Lisa.”
At any rate, when Leonardo left Florence again in 1506 he took the portrait with him. Over the next decade he would return to it to add touches here and there. Most scholars believe he finished it around 1517, just two years before his death.
From kings to museum to hidden in a trunk
When Leonardo died in 1519, he probably willed the “Mona Lisa,” along with other half-finished masterpieces, to one of his assistants.
Eventually, it became the possession of the French crown where it remained until the creation of the Louvre Museum in Paris following birth of the French Republic.
The painting hanged on a wall in the Louvre for about a century until a small, dark, Italian named Vicenzo Peruggia hatched a plan.
Peruggia was working as a handyman for the Louvre. His job was to build protective cases for some of the paintings in the collection, including the “Mona Lisa,” to prevent theft and vandalism – an irony that Leonardo himself would enjoy.
As he worked in the galleries, he frequently admired the work of Italy’s greatest artists. Day after day he pondered the “Mona Lisa,” each time becoming more and more angry that this painting, this masterpiece of Italian genius, remained in the possession of the French.
The French! The very people who had turned their backs on the budding nation of Italy, even going so far as to send in troops to help quell what eventually would become the unification of Italy.
Later during his trial, Peruggia would claim that he had been bewitched by the beauty of the painting – his lawyer argued diminished capacity.
Whatever the reason, on this day in 1911, Peruggia – who hid in a closet overnight to avoid security – walked out of the Louvre with the painting under his coat (I know, not the most complicated of plans, but it worked).
It took an entire day for the museum to realize the painting had been stolen. Once word got around, however, the theft electrified the world.
Suddenly, newspapers across the globe were printing the image of Lisa on their front pages and the race was on to recover this now-recognizably amazing masterpiece.
It took two years. After absconding with the portrait, Peruggia hid the painting in a trunk in his dingy apartment. There it remained until his patriotic zeal was overcome by a more pressing concern: poverty.
Peruggia reached out to an art dealer in Italy to try and sell the painting for a cool 500,000 lire. Writing a letter to the man, he signed the note “Leonardo.”
You can imagine the rest – a sting set up by the dealer and French authorities, the none-too-bright Peruggia handing over the painting to the dealer for “authentication,” French police showing up at Peruggia’s door and arresting him.
In the two years the painting remained missing, the search had created a sensation. At one point the artist Pablo Picasso was accused of stealing it and several French officials were fired or resigned in disgrace. When they finally recovered the “Mona Lisa,” she was paraded around triumphantly, her fame ensured.
And Peruggia? Well, the authorities tried Vicenzo in Italy. The trial was a sideshow, with Peruggia breaking out in shouting matches, changing his story and otherwise making a fool of himself.
He acted sufficiently insane that the court found him to be “intellectually deficient” and sentenced him to a mere seven months in jail. Since he had been in jail for eight months during the trial, he was immediately released.
Antone Pierucci is a Sacramento-based public historian and a freelance writer whose work has been featured in such magazines as Archaeology and Wild West as well as regional California newspapers.