The Mona Lisa, the world’s most well-known murals, performs an enormous half in drawing record-breaking crowds to the Musée du Louvre in Paris. (In 2022 the museum had 7.7 million guests). However lots of these guests could also be unaware that Leonardo da Vinci’s early Sixteenth-century masterpiece was stolen on 21 August 1911 in some of the audacious heists in artwork historical past.
In a brand new guide, The Thefts of the Mona Lisa: The Full Story of the World’s Most Well-known Art work, the artwork historian Noah Charney unpicks the theft, throwing new gentle on why and the way Vincenzo Peruggia, a museum worker, stole the portray, just for it to be recovered two years later when he tried to promote it to an antiques vendor in Florence referred to as Alfredo Geri. Intriguingly, Charney additionally reveals how the Spanish artist Pablo Picasso got here to be related to the crime.
“Whereas the 1911 theft is arguably probably the most well-known theft of an object in historical past, there are extra true intrigues surrounding the Mona Lisa and lots of hooey round it, too,” Charney says. “The hooey will be enjoyable but additionally deceptive. So I assumed it might be good to put in writing a definitive guide in regards to the crimes and mysteries surrounding the Mona Lisa as an object.”
The creator describes intimately how the Italian-born Peruggia, who labored for an organization subcontracted by the Louvre to organize protecting circumstances, engineered the theft. Peruggia was mistakenly below the impression that the Mona Lisa had been looted from Italy by Napoleon’s military throughout his Italian Marketing campaign (1796-97), writes Charney.
Charney questions the motives of Peruggia, who claimed that the theft was pushed by patriotism and the concept he was righting a historic improper. “There’s…ample proof that Peruggia was trying to make cash. This comes from Peruggia’s personal phrases in letters he wrote to his dad and mom, to Alfredo Geri, to a politician in his residence district and to a different artwork vendor in Rome,” he says. Peruggia requested Geri for 500,000 Italian lire, round $650,000, when he first approached the vendor about returning the Mona Lisa to Italy.
Noah Charney, creator of The Thefts of the Mona Lisa: The Full Story of the World’s Most Well-known Art work
Photograph: Urska Charney
However Charney tells The Artwork Newspaper: “It’s exhausting to not like Peruggia. He looks like man who noticed a chance and took it. He’s a working-class aspiring artist who occurred to work for a agency contracted by the Louvre, so he abruptly had insider entry. And he introduced the portray again to Florence after which returned it [after being arrested].”
The Picasso saga in the meantime centres on Honoré-Joseph Géry Pieret, who was briefly secretary to the French poet and playwright Guillaume Apollinaire. Géry Pieret was frequently stealing objects from the Louvre, maybe even compulsively, round 1906 and 1907, notes Charney.
This run of thefts culminated in a letter to Paris-Journal per week after the Mona Lisa was taken. “Monsieur, on 7 Might 1911 I stole a Phoenician statuette from one of many galleries on the Louvre. I’m holding this at your disposition, in return for the sum of fifty,000 francs,” Pieret wrote.
“This feminine sculpted head was stolen in 1911, and it bore the museum identification quantity AM880. This was, on the very least, the third Iberian bust stolen by Géry Pieret [from the Louvre],” writes Charney, including: “His letter to Paris-Journal defined that he had stolen two others, one male and one feminine bust, on two separate visits to the Louvre on back-to-back days, to not point out a piece of Egyptian plaster and who is aware of what else. He stated that he then offered them to unnamed pals in Paris, one in every of whom was a painter. It will end up that the ‘unnamed pal’ was Pablo Picasso.”
Certainly, each Picasso and Apollinaire had been in possession of two historic Iberian sculpted heads, stolen from the Louvre 4 years beforehand, round 1907. Fernande Olivier, Picasso’s lover on the time, says in her memoir (included in Charney’s guide): “Pieret gave Picasso two little statuettes with out revealing the place he had acquired them. He stated solely that they shouldn’t be displayed in too conspicuous a fashion. Picasso was enchanted and he treasured these presents and buried them behind a cabinet.”
Apollinaire finally delivered the busts to Paris-Journal below the situation of anonymity and the works had been returned to the Louvre. However on 7 September 1911 Apollinaire was arrested and accused of harbouring the thief of the Iberian statue heads; Picasso was additionally arrested. “The Paris police, greedy for a optimistic headline to offset the shortage of progress on the Mona Lisa case, threw in one other cost that was primarily based on no obvious proof: that Apollinaire was additionally concerned within the theft of the Mona Lisa,” Charney writes. Each males had been interrogated however later launched.
Charney says: “I really suppose the Picasso story ought to be an enormous chapter within the artist’s profession, however to date it had been a footnote or not even one. That is odd as a result of it’s verified and Picasso even joked about it. That is doubtless what is going to shock readers most: to study that Picasso himself was an artwork thief.And that stolen artwork from the Louvre—not the Mona Lisa—helped him launch creative Modernism.”
Crucially, the creator additionally tackles an vital subject that has gone down in art-world folklore: did the Nazis steal the Mona Lisa throughout the Second World Warfare? “The brief model is that some Nazis thought they’d the Mona Lisa however they in all probability had stolen an excellent copy as a substitute. The total story is way extra intriguing than that one-liner however you’ll should learn the guide for extra,” Charney concludes.
• Noah Charney, The Thefts of the Mona Lisa: The Full Story of the World’s Most Well-known Art work, Rowman & Littlefield, 176pp, £25 (hb)
