Part V
Chapter 14
Years ago, as my husband and I toured the French royal palace at Fontainebleau, about thirty-four miles outside of Paris, an unmistakable Texas twang echoed through filigreed halls that pushed ostentation to new levels of excess.
“This,” the voice boomed, “is one hell of a goddamn château!”
The phrase became the punch line of our trip: Notre-Dame? One hell of a goddamn cathedral! The Arc de Triomphe? One hell of a goddamn arch!
When I learned that King Francis I, credited with bringing the Renaissance to France, had hung his newly acquired portrait of La Joconde in his private bath at Fontainebleau, I knew immediately that it would have been one hell of a goddamn lavatory.
In fact, the Appartement des Bains consisted of a six-room “bathing” suite complete with pool, steam room, gambling tables, and lounge. In this ultraexclusive men’s club, Francis, his friends, courtiers, and their guests (often females other than royal wives) played cards, soaked, smoked, sweated, relaxed, and engaged in recreational pursuits of every type.
The painting may have taken up residence there sometime around 1525. Lisa Gherardini, then forty-six years old, would live another seventeen years. Did she ever learn of its whereabouts? One of her contemporaries did. Giorgio Vasari, the first to describe her portrait, lived in Florence off and on from 1524 to 1550.
I first encountered this remarkable Renaissance man—artist, architect, engineer, historian, author—years ago when I was researching my biography of the Italian language. The idea for his collection of life stories of Italian artists, I learned, grew out of a dinner conversation at the Palazzo Farnese in Rome around 1543 (shortly after Lisa Gherardini’s death). The A-list guests, swapping reminiscences of the artistic giants who had beautified Italy, worried that their stories might soon be forgotten and lost forever. A learned bishop volunteered to compile a treatise, but he soon turned the project over to the boundlessly energetic Vasari.
In order to write the first book of art history, Vasari interviewed people who had known various painters and sculptors during their lives and seen their works firsthand. Although he started his research after the death of Lisa Gherardini and her husband, Vasari could have talked with their sons, not just about Leonardo, but also about lesser artists who had completed commissions for Francesco del Giocondo. In 1550, Bartolomeo and Piero, both in their fifties, would have read Vasari’s account of Leonardo’s life in the first edition of Le Vite (The Lives), which quickly became the talk of their art-obsessed town.
Did Vasari get the story of the Mona Lisa right? This depends on whom you ask. Over the centuries critics have challenged his dubious dating and florid embellishments, but the essay on Leonardo has largely held up.
“Think of Vasari writing about Leonardo like somebody today writing about the Beatles,” historian Fabrizio Ricciardelli suggests when I seek his perspective. Even if Vasari never saw the Mona Lisa—just as a young author today would not have heard the Beatles perform live—plenty of eyewitnesses would have pounced on glaring errors. Vasari himself corrected many factual mistakes in an expanded second edition of Le Vite published in 1568, but only one in his essay on Leonardo: his initial identification of Ser Piero da Vinci as the artist’s uncle rather than his father.
France’s monarchs treated La Joconde as capriciously as they treated any other woman in the court. Some adored her; others ignored her. The portrait remained in the royal bathing suite until late in the sixteenth century, even though the steamy rooms were no place for a painted lady. Perhaps in an ill-fated attempt to repair decades of damage, a Dutch restorer applied a thick coat of lacquer to the portrait. The varnish dulled the colors before fracturing into a web of threadlike fissures called craquelure. Mona Lisa has never since appeared without this veil.
By the beginning of the seventeenth century, the portrait had moved to the Cabinet des Tableaux, later called the Pavillon des Peintures (Pavilion of the Paintings) at Fontainebleau. Louis XIII (1601–1643) seems to have been so indifferent to Mona Lisa’s charms that in 1625 the young monarch considered swapping the painting in a two-for-one deal with King Charles I of England for a Titian and a Holbein. His ministers, arguing that one of Leonardo’s best pictures should not leave France, talked him out of the exchange.
The portrait’s reputation rebounded. In a 1642 inventory of the Treasures and Marvels of the Royal Household of Fontainebleau, Père Dan, Father Superior of its monastery, described the portrait of “a virtuous Italian lady . . . Mona Lissa [sic] commonly known as La Joconde” as the “premier en estime, comme une merveille de la peinture” (the most esteemed work in the royal collection, a marvel of painting).
The next regent smitten by the Italian lady was Louis XIV (1638–1715), a sophisticated art connoisseur. The Sun King ordered La Joconde transferred to the bedroom of his new palace at Versailles. There, during his long reign, she watched his lovers come—and invariably go—as Louis retired paramour after paramour to convents. Only La Joconde remained in his favor.
Louis XIV’s official historian, André Félibien des Avaux, was equally enamored. “I have never seen anything more finished or expressive,” he raved. “There is so much grace and so much sweetness in the eyes and the features of the face that it seems alive. One has the impression that this is indeed a woman who takes pleasure in being looked at.”
After Louis XIV’s death, Mona Lisa lost that pleasure. Like his ex-mistresses, her portrait ended up cloistered—in her case in the office of the Directeur des Batiments (Keeper of the Royal Buildings) in Versailles. But the fall from grace may have been fortuitous. France was careening toward revolution.
Although I had already concluded that fewer than six degrees of separation come between Leonardo, the Mona Lisa, and any conceivable topic, I did not anticipate a link to the French Revolution, Marie Antoinette, and Benjamin Franklin. I found one in the story of the so-called Vernon Mona Lisa.
According to this colorful account, the court of the ill-fated King Louis XVI (1754–1793) boasted two versions of the Mona Lisa—the poplar panel and a canvas painting that hung in the chambers of Queen Marie Antoinette (1755–1793). We don’t know if the queen thought it was an original Leonardo, but she singled the painting out for special care.
Sometime before her grim encounter with the guillotine in 1793, Marie Antoinette reportedly entrusted the portrait to a young American named William Henry Vernon—perhaps for safekeeping, perhaps as a gift for helping to save the life of her son, the Dauphin of France and heir to the throne.
Vernon was the son of a shipbuilder in the colony of Rhode Island who had amassed a fortune trading in rum, slaves, and molasses. During the American Revolution, the senior Vernon, head of the Continental navy board, befriended men such as George Washington, John Adams, and the French Marquis de Lafayette. After the war, he dispatched his son to Paris to learn French and acquire some old-world polish.
Young Vernon fell so deeply under Paris’s intoxicating spell that he became a pomaded regular at the court of King Louis XVI. When the American’s princely lifestyle plunged him into debt, the youth asked Benjamin Franklin, ambassador to France at the time and another of his father’s influential friends, for a loan. Fearing for the young man’s future, Franklin wrote to the elder Vernon, urging him to rescue his son from a misspent life.
“He will inevitably be lost, if he is suffered to remain longer at Paris,” Franklin warned. “I would recommend your making the voyage yourself to reclaim and bring him home with you.”
The prodigal son defied his father’s urgent pleas that he return home and ended up briefly imprisoned during the French Revolution. He later traveled to England and Russia before returning to Rhode Island in 1797 with chests of brocaded finery and a superb collection of paintings attributed to Michelangelo, Murillo, van Dyck, and other masters. He called his favorite The Nun, “a finished piece by Leonardo de Vincy [sic].”
When he told his relatives that he had acquired the work from Marie Antoinette, they seem to have been more shocked than skeptical. Some spinster aunts considered the French queen so wicked that they allegedly burned letters she had written to their nephew.
Vernon hung The Nun, his most cherished possession, in his bedroom. Family members reported seeing him kneeling before it with tears in his eyes. After his death his heirs auctioned off Vernon’s entire collection. A relative bought The Nun, which passed from generation to generation as a family heirloom before consignment to a bank vault, where it remains to this day.
After the revolution, the citizens of France claimed the priceless art in royal palaces as their own. A government commission selected the finest paintings for transfer to a section of the ancient palace of the Louvre, the new home for “the people’s art.” The Mona Lisa, one of the last works chosen, arrived in 1797 but did not remain long.
This time a conqueror took a fancy to her. In 1800, Napoleon Bonaparte (1769–1821) had the portrait he dubbed “Madame Lisa” placed in his bedroom in the Tuileries Palace. In time, the Emperor would become infatuated with a young Italian woman who bore a remarkable resemblance to the lady in the painting—a possible granddaughter, generations removed, of Lisa Gherardini.
When she tells me this bit of family lore, the dark eyes of Princess Natalia Guicciardini Strozzi, of the current generation of Gherardini descendants, sparkle.
“Her name was Teresa Guadagni,” she says with a smile, “but Napoleon called her ‘la belle italienne.’ ”
Wondering how their paths might have crossed, I delve into an obscure chapter of French history. In 1805, after the Senate of France set up the First French Empire, Napoleon appointed his younger sister, her Imperial Highness Élisa, to rule over a large part of the Italian peninsula as Duchess of Lucca, Princess of Piombino, and Grand Duchess of Tuscany. In 1807, La Madame, as her Italian subjects called her, set up the Institut Élisa, a school for noble-born girls created to produce well-educated, refined wives, and recruited the fairest of local aristocratic daughters to serve as “dames-in-waiting.”
Among them was Teresa Guadagni, who was born in 1790 and probably joined the court as a teenager. She may have caught the Emperor’s eye in Paris, which his sister visited regularly with her entourage. Despite Napoleon’s ardent pursuit, Teresa resisted his advances. In 1810, Napoleon divorced his first wife, Josephine, and wed Marie-Louise Habsburg of Austria. Five years later he was defeated at Waterloo and exiled.
La Madame Élisa Bonaparte, arrested and briefly imprisoned, was allowed to stay in a country house near Trieste. Her former attendant Teresa Guadagni married an Italian count. Decades later her son Adolfo reportedly sold the portrait of Lisa Gherardini that had long been in the family to pay his debts. The Gherardini descendants have no idea what became of it.
As Napoleon’s agents plundered Europe’s museums and libraries, French scholars developed an Italian obsession of their own: Leonardo da Vinci. Milan’s Ambrosiana Library alone relinquished fourteen volumes of drawings and writings, all in the painter’s unmistakable mirror script. Conservators in the Louvre pounced on the pages and began classifying, studying, and copying.
As the unknown Leonardo—the scientist, the engineer, the naturalist, the universal genius—emerged from their research, he became a cult figure, celebrated less for his artworks, many unfinished, damaged, or lost, than for his restless, inquisitive, free-ranging “modern” mind. The French proudly claimed “Léonard de Vinci” as their own, an adopted son whose genius only they truly appreciated.
By 1815, “Madame Lisa” had returned to the Louvre, a place unlike any of her former residences. In its storied past, this medieval fortress had served as the setting for trials, coups, revolutions, hangings, assassinations, assaults, and royal weddings. For many years prostitutes plied their trade in its shadows. Artists worked and lived on the premises with their families, hanging out laundry on clotheslines and cooking on open stoves in the courtyard. Napoleon reportedly ousted them for fear they would set fire to the palace.
After three hundred years as the exclusive property of a privileged few, the Mona Lisa moved into the public eye. At first she seemed just another pretty face. In 1840, experts calculating the market value of every painting in the Louvre set the worth of “La Joconde, wife of Francesco del Giocondo,” at 90,000 francs—a relatively modest sum compared with 150,000 francs for Leonardo’s Virgin of the Rocks and 600,000 francs for Raphael’s Holy Family.
The portrait’s fame spread mainly through copies by artists who set up easels in the Louvre and reproduced the works of great masters. Between 1851 and 1880 (when photography revolutionized the distribution of images), artists painted the Mona Lisa seventy-one times—an impressive number, but far less than works by other Italian artists such as Veronese and Titian.
Leonardo’s lady did inspire one man’s singular devotion. The great Italian engraver Luigi Calamatta dedicated twenty eye-straining years to the first exact engraving of the portrait. Copies of his immensely popular work, completed in 1857, spread Lisa’s image throughout Europe.
The timing was perfect. The world was falling in love with love, and no place throbbed with more giddy infatuation than Paris. To the Romantics of the late nineteenth century, Lisa’s became the face that launched a thousand fantasies. Suitors bearing flowers, poems, and impassioned notes climbed the grand staircase of the Louvre to gaze into her “limpid and burning eyes.” Essayists agonized over Leonardo’s femme fatale. Was she Madonna or whore? Mother or temptress? Seductress or seduced? Innocent or irresistible? What lay behind the magical woman’s magical smile?
“Lovers, poets, dreamers go and die at her feet,” a French curator wrote in 1861. He wasn’t exaggerating. In 1852, the artist Luc Maspero threw himself from the fourth-floor window of his Paris hotel, leaving a farewell note that said, “For years I have grappled desperately with her smile. I prefer to die.”
The art critic Théophile Gautier, smitten by “the sensuous, serpentine mouth” that made viewers feel as timid as “schoolboys in the presence of a duchess,” called Mona Lisa “the sphinx of beauty.”
“Beware, La Gioconda is a dangerous picture,” warned the stricken French historian Jules Michelet. “The painting attracts me, revolts me, consumes me. I go to her in spite of myself, as the bird to the serpent.”
The English author Walter Pater took the Romantics’ obsession to greater heights—or depths—in his influential book The Renaissance. “Hers is the head upon which all the ends of the world are come,” he sighed, “a beauty wrought out from within upon the flesh, the deposit, little cell by cell, of strange thoughts and fantastic reveries and exquisite passions. . . . She is older than the rocks among which she sits; like the vampire, she has been dead many times, and learned the secret of the grave.”
Drowning in torrents of purplish prose, I couldn’t even recognize the Lisa Gherardini I had come to know in Florence. What would she have thought of the overwrought declarations? The virtuous, modest, principled Renaissance woman would have been horrified.
To restore my sense of la donna vera, I head to the Palazzo Strozzi, the architectural marvel begun in 1489 when Lisa was ten. It seems only fitting that this landmark should house the Biblioteca dell’Istituto Nazionale di Studi sul Rinascimento, a unique collection of writings from and about the Renaissance.
Its rooms, lined with books from floor to ceiling and lit by sunlight streaming from high beveled windows, smell like old leather and musty paper. My footsteps echo in the silence as I climb an open staircase to an upper-level balcony containing works on Leonardo.
Crouched in the narrow aisle, I browse through one worn book after another, not exactly sure what I am seeking. Then I spy a thin, pink-covered monograph titled Leonardo da Vinci e La Gioconda, published in Florence about a century ago as a gift (in dono) to buyers of an artistic reproduction of La Gioconda (price: 2 lire).
“Interessantissimo!” the back cover proclaims. Most interesting! And it is. Many of the factual statements about Lisa, such as the claim that she was a Neapolitan aristocrat, have since been disproved. But I discover in its yellowed pages an excerpt from a novel by the Russian writer Dmitri Merejkowski, Il Romanzo di Leonardo da Vinci, an international best-seller translated into Italian around 1900.
At first I merely plod through Merejkowski’s ponderous philosophizing. However, as I read his evocative descriptions of the interaction between Leonardo and Lisa, I wonder if I may have stumbled upon some of the deeper truths that only fiction can reveal.
In the Russian’s narrative, Lisa does not sit passively and patiently as Leonardo reproduces her features. Rather, she works intensely to communicate the deepest and truest of feelings so his brush can capture the motions of her mind and the passions of her soul. As partners in the creative process, artist and model forge a bond so intimate that they understand each other almost without words.
Through what Merejkowski describes as their “profound and mystic caresses,” Leonardo and Lisa bring forth “an immortal image of a new being . . . born of them both, even as a child is born of its father and mother.” The process transforms Lisa, “the most ordinary of mortals,” into “a changeling, a feminine double of Leonardo himself.” This similarity has less to do with facial features than with the expression in the eyes and the smile. Especially the smile.
Their story does not end happily. Lisa leaves to travel with her husband to southern Italy. In a touching farewell scene, Leonardo grasps her hand and, for the first time, presses it to his mouth, as she brushes the top of his bent head with her lips. Lisa dies unexpectedly on the trip, and they never see each other again.
When a devastated Leonardo returns to his easel, he sees in the portrait the essence of Lisa Gherardini, as if he had stolen the spirit of the living woman to bestow upon her image. “The mystery of the universe,” he concludes, “was the mystery of Mona Lisa.”
In real life, ever stranger than fiction, the mystery deepened.
“La Joconde, c’est partie!” (The Mona Lisa is gone!) a guard at the Louvre gasped in horror on Tuesday, August 22, 1911. Only four iron hooks framed by a ghostly rectangular shape hung in her place on the wall. Since the museum was closed Mondays, no one had noticed her departure. The frame was found unmarred in a stairwell, as if the Florentine lady had emerged from it, in one chronicler’s words, “as effortlessly as a woman stepped out of her petticoats.”
In an instant La Joconde became the most wanted woman in the world, transformed from a missing masterpiece to a missing person. News of the sensational “affaire de La Joconde,” traveling as fast as telegraph and cable could carry it, captivated millions, including many who had never heard of the portrait. Tabloids churned out reams of copy on the painting and its seductive model. The public responded as emotionally as they might to an abduction or kidnapping.
When the Louvre reopened on August 29, grieving Parisians lined up to view the blank space, which Le Figaro described as “an enormous, horrific, gaping void.” Visitors in record numbers left flowers and wept. Guillaume Apollinaire, a flamboyant poet and cultural provocateur who had once called for the burning of the Louvre, was arrested as a suspect. The police hauled in his friend the Spanish painter Pablo Picasso, working in Paris at the time, for questioning.
Gone missing from the heart of Paris, the Mona Lisa popped up almost everywhere else. I can’t help but think of the reports of its whereabouts as artistic Elvis sightings. The portrait was seen crossing the border into Switzerland, hopping a freight train for Holland, boarding a steamer for South America. One witness placed it in a private gallery in St. Petersburg; another, in an apartment in the Bronx. Long before the technology existed for her image to go viral, Mona Lisa’s smile—like the Cheshire cat’s—seemed to materialize from thin air on kiosks, billboards, and magazine covers.
More than two years passed, and the hubbub died down. The Louvre removed the Mona Lisa from its catalogue and hung Raphael’s portrait of the courtly author Baldassare Castiglione, the friend and admirer of Giuliano de’ Medici, in her place.
Then, on November 29, 1913, Alfredo Geri, an antiques dealer with an upscale shop on Via Borgo Ognissanti in Florence, received a letter postmarked from Paris and signed “Leonardo.” The writer—and the unlikely perpetrator of “the heist of the century”—was an Italian named Vincenzo Peruggia, a thirty-two-year-old amateur painter who had occasionally worked as a handyman at the Louvre. Deftly removing the painting from the frame he had helped construct, he hid it under his coat and carried it out of the building.
“The stolen work of Leonardo da Vinci is in my possession,” the note read. “It seems to belong to Italy since its painter was an Italian. My dream is to give back this masterpiece to the land from which it came and to the country that inspired it.” Skeptical, Geri brought the letter to Giovanni Poggi, director of the Uffizi, who advised him to request a chance to inspect the painting in Florence before making an offer.
On December 10, a short, dark-complexioned man, not more than five feet three, with pomaded hair and a handlebar mustache waxed at the tips, checked in to the Albergo Tripoli-Italia, a shabby cut-rate hotel on Via Panzani not far from the train station in Florence. The hotel, renamed La Gioconda in honor of its sole claim to fame, has spruced up since then. In the cramped lobby I inquire about the room where La Gioconda was found. No. 20 is occupied, the weary-eyed desk clerk informs me, but I can walk up if I want.
On the way I imagine “Leonardo” leading portly Geri and dignified Poggi up the same steep stairs. On that distant day, the thief ushered them into his room and locked the door. Wordlessly dragging a wooden case from under the bed, he heaved it onto the rumpled sheets and dumped out woolen underwear, shirts, shoes, and other “wretched things,” as Geri put it, to reveal a false bottom. Under it was a package bundled in red silk.
“To our amazed eyes, the divine Gioconda appeared intact and marvelously preserved,” Geri reported. “We carried it to a window to compare it to a photograph we had brought with us. Poggi studied it and we had no doubt the painting was authentic.” Closer examination would reveal a bruiselike discoloration on one cheek and a small scratch on her left shoulder. Otherwise the Mona Lisa was in remarkably good shape for a four-hundred-year-old who had spent two years in cheap rooms in Paris before hopping a train to Florence.
The Uffizi’s Poggi insisted on taking the portrait back to his museum to compare it with other works by Leonardo. Peruggia, who expected the Italian government to pay him 500,000 lire—about $2.14 million today—for the “great service rendered,” remained in his room. Within the hour, police hammered on his door. Waking from a nap, the clueless thief accompanied them without protest, confident that he soon would be released, rewarded, and hailed as a hero.
Diagnosed by a court psychiatrist as “mentally deficient,” Peruggia embellished his story in repeated tellings. At first he claimed patriotism as his sole motive. But as he warmed to his tale, the art thief claimed that he had been “bewitched” by la Gioconda: “I fell victim to her smile and feasted my eyes on my treasure every evening, discovering each time new beauty and perversity in her. I fell in love with her.”
At the trial on June 4, 1914, the French, embarrassed by their poor security and botched investigation, did not press for harsh punishment. His defenders portrayed Peruggia as a simple working stiff in a hostile country where he was mocked as a “macaroni,” his tools stolen and his wine salted. His initial sentence of a year and fifteen days was reduced to seven months and nine days. With time served, Peruggia was released immediately—so penniless that he turned his pockets inside out as he left the courthouse.
Peruggia’s hometown of Dumenza in Lombardy welcomed him as a hero. During the First World War, he joined the Italian army and served honorably, then married, moved back to France, had a daughter, and opened a nursery in Haute-Savoie. He died on October 8, 1925, his forty-fourth birthday, of a heart attack.
Even today, theories persist that his theft was part of an elaborate scheme to pass off forged copies of the Mona Lisa as the stolen original. But in 1913, Italians were just happy to have their long-lost daughter home.
Although many in Florence hoped that “their” Lisa would remain in residence, the Italian government immediately began arrangements to deliver the painting to the French—and to do so “with a solemnity worthy of Leonardo and a spirit of happiness worthy ofLa Gioconda’s smile.” But for an exhilarating two weeks, La Gioconda was Italy’s to enjoy.
On December 14, flanked by an honor guard and carabinieri in full dress uniform, Leonardo’s lady, displayed in an ornate sixteenth-century frame, was carried through the corridors of the Uffizi in reverent silence. Soldiers saluted; men doffed their hats; women made the sign of the cross. La Gioconda was placed on a velvet-draped dais between two of Leonardo’s earlier masterpieces, the Annunciation and the Adoration of the Magi. A crowd of more than 30,000 swept past the guards and mobbed the museum in a wild rush to see her.
After five days (the last reserved for schoolchildren and their teachers), La Gioconda traveled in a custom-fitted padded rosewood box in a private parlor car to Rome and a viewing by King Victor Emmanuel. On December 21, 1913, at a solemn ceremony befitting a coronation, Mona Lisa officially took up residence in the French embassy in the Palazzo Farnese. During her Roman holiday, the Queen of Italy, the Queen Mother, and the entire diplomatic corps came to call. La Gioconda then went on display for five days in the elegant Villa Borghese.
From Rome the painting traveled to Milan’s Brera Gallery, which stayed open until midnight on her final night to accommodate a crowd of 60,000. A commemorative medal bore a likeness of Leonardo and an inscription: “May her divine smile ever shine.” ThenLa Gioconda left Italy aboard a private railway car on the Milan–Paris express, never to return.
Paris welcomed back its adopted daughter with characteristic élan. Her image beamed from posters and banners. As an homage, society women adopted the “La Joconde look,” dusting yellow powder on their faces and necks to suggest her golden complexion and immobilizing their facial muscles to mimic her smile. In Parisian cabarets, dancers dressed as La Joconde performed a saucy can-can.
After a thorough checkup by experts at the École des Beaux-Arts, art’s most notorious woman was ready for her grand entrance. In grainy black-and-white photos in digitized newspapers of January 4, 1914, I see the ecstatic faces of Parisians lining the streets to cheer the portrait as it rode in a gala procession to the Louvre. In her first two days back on exhibit, 120,000 visitors streamed to view La Joconde—so many that the museum temporarily set aside a gallery all her own.
But something beyond the painting’s wild popularity had changed. The Mona Lisa had left the Louvre a work of art; she returned as public property, the first mass art icon. Anyone could say anything about her, do anything with her image, recast her in every possible way—and they did.
In 1919, Marcel Duchamp, who claimed that art could be made of anything (including a urinal), painted a mustache and a goatee on a monochrome postcard of the Mona Lisa and called it L.H.O.O.Q. (letters which, when spelled in French, sound like slang for “She’s got a hot ass”). He was the first of a long string of twentieth-century artists—including Dalí, Léger, Magritte, Rauschenberg, and Andy Warhol—who couldn’t resist taking liberties with Madame Lisa.
The Mona Lisa slipped out of sight again just before World War II. In 1939 the French spirited the painting to a series of safe houses, all equipped with central heating to keep the ambient temperature constant. Over the course of several years she was moved to the château at Amboise, adjacent to Leonardo’s former home; the Abbey of Loc-Dieu; and the Ingres Museum in Montauban.
Even out of view, the Mona Lisa remained on people’s lips. The British used a coded message—La Joconde garde un sourire (The Mona Lisa keeps her smile)—to contact the French Resistance. The portrait returned to the Louvre in October 1947, two years after the war’s end.
Soon the world started singing her name. The songwriters Jay Livingston and Ray Evans composed a tune I still can’t get out of my head. First sung by Nat King Cole in an eminently forgettable film called Captain Carey USA, “Mona Lisa” won the Academy Award for Best Original Song and became the top-selling record of 1950. Several generations of crooners—from Bing Crosby to Elvis Presley to Tom Jones to Michael Bublé—have since asked, “Are you warm, are you real, Mona Lisa? Or just a cold and lonely, lovely work of art.”
The lovely work also came under attack. In 1956 a vandal threw acid at the lower part of the painting; later that year a young Bolivian flung a rock, chipping a speck of pigment on the left elbow. Protective glass has kept the painting safe against more recent missiles, including a terra-cotta mug, purchased at the Louvre gift shop and heaved at the painting by a Russian woman distraught over being denied French citizenship. The attacks, art critics theorize, may stem from the same source as the adulation: the passion that Leonardo’s painting provokes.
With the dawning of a new global age, the Mona Lisa, as France’s cultural ambassador, began touring like a rock star. In 1962 two masters of politics and promotion—French president Charles de Gaulle and his minister of culture, André Malraux—orchestrated a high-profile journey. Despite strenuous objections from curators at the Louvre, Leonardo’s lady sailed for the New World discovered by Columbus when Lisa Gherardini was a girl of thirteen.
The Mona Lisa traveled in style. With a $100 million insurance policy (today’s equivalent: approximately $608 million), the portrait settled into her own first-class cabin on the S.S. France, with security guards on one side and nervous Louvre conservators on the other. Outfitted in a custom-made 350-pound airtight, floatable, temperature-and-humidity-controlled container constructed of steel alloy and padded with Styrofoam, she was without doubt the safest passenger on the luxury liner.
The director of the National Gallery of Art and a Secret Service contingent met the French delegation at the dock in New York. For the trip to Washington, D.C., the portrait rode in a modified ambulance padded with foam rubber. The National Gallery anticipated every need. Because of concern about changes in atmospheric pressure, its air-conditioning system was modified to simulate the very air Mona Lisa “breathed” in Paris.
President John F. Kennedy welcomed the illustrious visitor with honors usually reserved for a head of state. “The life of this painting,” he noted, “spans the entire life of the New World. We citizens of nations unborn at the time of its creation are among the inheritors and protectors of the ideals which gave it birth.” Visitors snaked in long lines down the National Mall to pay homage to “this great creation of the civilization which we share, the beliefs which we protect, and the aspirations toward which we together strive.”
The painting traveled to New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art for a sold-out, monthlong engagement. In a single week some 250,000 visitors came, each pausing, by The New Yorker’s estimates, an average of four seconds to gaze upon the work that had taken Leonardo so many years to create. By the end of Mona Lisa’s American tour, more than 1,600,000 people had laid eyes on the portrait.
Searching for coverage of the visit in the archives of Life, the most popular magazine of the day, I came upon another familiar face: the so-called Vernon Mona Lisa, which the family had become convinced was a Leonardo original. In 1964 the painting went on display at the Otis Art Institute in Los Angeles.
According to the Life report, the Vernons were willing to sell their heirloom—at an asking price of some $2.5 million. With no buyers, the Vernon Mona Lisa returned to its New Jersey bank vault. Experts have come to regard the painting as an excellent copy, probably painted by a seventeenth- or eighteenth-century French artist.
Once the French had their original La Joconde safely back in the Louvre, its curators swore she would never again leave their protective custody. But in 1974, Mona Lisa turned jet-setter, flying halfway around the world from Paris to Tokyo. To avoid any change in pressure during the flights, her aluminum travel case was encased in a protective steel container.
Tokyo went mad for Mona Lisa, displaying the portrait like a sacred relic and allowing each visitor ten seconds of one-on-one viewing. In Russia, visitors also flocked to view the portrait, but their responses were more muted. “A plain, sensible-looking woman,” opined Communist leader Leonid Brezhnev.
These journeys capped what some call the “Frenchification” of Mona Lisa. No painting by a French artist could have matched her celebrity status, but at first I found it odd that France would send as a symbol of its artistic patrimony a portrait of an Italian lady by an Italian painter. Then I realized that the Mona Lisa had transcended geographical borders. Like the Eiffel Tower, the Taj Mahal, or the Great Wall of China, the portrait had risen to the stratosphere of world wonders, something that everyone everywhere, from any country or culture, could appreciate.
Beginning in 2004, the year after her official five hundredth birthday, under the auspices of the Louvre and the Centre de Recherche et de Restauration des Musées de France, Madame Lisa underwent the most extensive battery of technological examinations ever performed on a painting. The goal, Louvre director Henri Loyrette explained, was “to lift part of the veil of mystery that covers this work.”
In Mona Lisa: Inside the Painting, the oversize volume that details the findings, I peruse images of the Mona Lisa as she had never before been seen, including X-rays, infrared and multispectrum photographs, and ultraviolet fluorescence scans. In many, Lisa appears as a colorful abstraction or ghostly apparition, but I am captivated by an infrared reflectograph, which penetrates opaque pigments to reveal how the painting looked at an earlier stage.
Two full-page blowups provide “before” and “after” images of Lisa. In the reflectograph, her face appears stolid and square, her features heavy, her cheeks thick, the grain of her skin irregular. In a photograph of the finished painting, Lisa’s face has rounded into an oval, with delicate features and gleaming skin. The astounding difference testifies to how Leonardo, with his multitude of brushstrokes, made Lisa beautiful. I imagine him as an old man, squinting at the portrait and leaning close to add yet another minuscule daub to his creation.
In another innovative evaluation, Parisian engineer Pascal Cotte, founder of Lumiere Technology, used an ultrapowerful “multispectral” camera to create a digitized image of the painting. Working with some 240,000,000 pixels, his team of experts removed—virtually, in every sense of the word—centuries of time-stained varnishes to reveal brighter colors, a more animated face, and a lusher background.
Photos made with conventional cameras of the verso, or back side, of the Mona Lisa portray a very different image: a humble, faded piece of wood. At the upper right is a centuries-old crack with some simple strips of tape crossing it in a T shape. Despite this fissure, experts consider the portrait, though darkened and dirty, in remarkably good shape.
The Louvre is determined to keep her that way. When spring comes to Paris and the air in the museum approximates ideal levels of heat and humidity, Mona Lisa is freed from her frame to undergo an annual checkup. More than two dozen analysts scrutinize the work, checking for everything from any expansion or contraction of the poplar panel to a return of the wood-eating deathwatch beetles that infected one of her earlier frames.
For the rest of the year, Madame Lisa hangs in splendid isolation in a remodeled chamber behind sheets of bulletproof, triple-laminated, non-reflective glass that maintain the temperature at a constant 55 degrees Fahrenheit. The most-visited attraction in the most-visited museum in the world regally greets a stream of visitors who bathe her in a continuous blitzkrieg of camera flashes. From all countries, speaking all languages, men, women, and children come for the simplest of reasons: to view the most famous painting in the world.
I was no different.
When I first saw the Mona Lisa, smaller and darker than I’d expected, on a breathless dash through the Louvre many years ago, I didn’t know that Lisa Gherardini even existed. After a few moments of contemplation, my husband and I trudged on through what seemed like mile upon mile of masterpieces. Collapsing at the exit in a state of complete aesthetic exhaustion, I couldn’t resist saying, “This is one hell of a goddamn museum!”
When I return for a more leisurely visit, “she” notices. Like many other visitors, I experience the unnerving sensation—an optical illusion, some say—of Lisa beholding me while I stare at her. Her gaze seems knowing; her eye, discerning. This is a woman who thinks, I realize, although she keeps her thoughts to herself.
Standing in front of the portrait, I “feel” as well as see Mona Lisa. What I sense is an appeal beyond mere beauty: Womanly wisdom. Sisterly warmth. Quiet strength. Tender compassion. Profound serenity. Sly wit. Just a smidgen of mischief. And, ah yes, mystery.
I smile back at her.