The Mona Lisa Vanishes: List 2

by Nicholas Day
This nonfiction narrative traces how Leonardo da Vinci's 16th-century painting of an ordinary Italian wife and mother became the most recognizable face in the world.

This list covers "Tell Me, Tell Me, Tell Me"–"The Mona Lisa is Nowhere, The Mona Lisa is Everywhere."

Here are links to our lists for the book: List 1, List 2, List 3, List 4, List 5
40 words 59 learners

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Full list of words from this list:

words only definitions & notes
  1. shun
    avoid and stay away from deliberately
    Renaissance Italy does not shun illegitimate children. As a young boy, Leonardo is welcomed into Ser Piero’s household and raised, among his many legitimate siblings, by his grandparents. But he never fully belongs. He is always on the outside.
  2. painstaking
    characterized by extreme care and great effort
    With oils, layers of paint can be built up to achieve an entirely new effect. They also allow for slow, painstaking work: With oils, an artist can take as long as he wants.
  3. shaft
    a column of light
    Before Ser Piero comes back to collect the shield, Leonardo positions it so that a shaft of sunlight hits it square—and when Ser Piero walks into the room, he sees a monster rise up before his eyes.
  4. unlettered
    uneducated in general; lacking knowledge or sophistication
    He’s never had a proper education; he’s never learned Latin, the language of scholarship. He tries to master it. Like a schoolboy, he fills his notebooks with Latin words, but he never really succeeds. He describes himself as an uomo senza lettere—an unlettered man.
  5. billow
    rise and move, as in waves
    He wears rose-pink robes that billow behind him.
  6. entourage
    the group following and attending to some important person
    He sweeps through the streets with an entourage of admirers.
  7. striking
    having a quality that thrusts itself into attention
    He looks like the Vitruvian Man, whom he would later draw—the perfectly proportional human whose outstretched limbs all touch the sides of a circle. But he’s more than physically striking.
  8. consensus
    agreement in the judgment reached by a group as a whole
    History’s consensus is that Michelangelo was a jerk.
  9. clairvoyant
    someone who can perceive things not present to the senses
    One clairvoyant said the painting had been stolen by a birdman—a person with a neck like an ostrich and hair like feathers. Still another clairvoyant asked his dog, Pilu, about the Mona Lisa.
  10. forensic
    used in the investigation of facts or evidence in court
    But this new century was the dawn of what was optimistically called forensic science. It was a fancy way of saying that the police were beginning to figure out how to do police work.
  11. scattershot
    covering a wide range in a haphazard way
    He’d reformed the Paris police, introducing professional standards to a scattershot operation.
  12. undertaking
    any piece of work that is attempted
    Every inch of the Louvre was searched: the nooks and crannies, the cupboards, closets, and cubbyholes. It was a massive undertaking.
  13. slapdash
    marked by great carelessness
    They discovered that security was slapdash, paintings were moved without authorization, and the museum photographers ran the place.
  14. resentful
    full of or marked by indignant ill will
    The Louvre staff were interviewed. They weren’t happy about it. They were already resentful—they’d recently lost a battle to unionize—and some stopped talking to the police.
  15. mundane
    found in the ordinary course of events
    That was the problem: no one knew anything, so even normal things were suspicious. The most mundane act, the most average visitor, could be a clue.
  16. exasperating
    extremely annoying or displeasing
    That was the problem: no one knew anything, so even normal things were suspicious. The most mundane act, the most average visitor, could be a clue. It was exhilarating and exasperating.
  17. recollection
    something recalled to the mind
    When Brigadier Paupardin was interviewed by the police, he mostly remembered the heat. But he had a dim recollection of a frequent visitor to the Salon Carré.
  18. inevitable
    incapable of being avoided or prevented
    In France, a land of love affairs, this explanation—that the Mona Lisa was kidnapped by a would-be lover—seemed logical, maybe even inevitable.
  19. alias
    a name that has been assumed temporarily
    The problem of identification plagued policing. Aliases—fake identities—almost always worked because the police had no good way to keep track of who was who.
  20. temperamental
    subject to sharply varying moods
    A sarcastic, temperamental man, he’d been expelled from three different schools.
  21. stature
    the height of a standing person
    The descriptions in the bureau’s files were supposed to help identify suspects, but they were comically vague: “Stature: Average. Face: Ordinary.”
  22. projection
    any solid convex shape that juts out from something
    It called for the police to take a series of incredibly specific measurements—the length of the right ear, for example, or the length of the left middle finger. The nose was split into multiple sections: height, width, projection.
  23. cumbersome
    difficult to handle or use, especially because of size or weight
    His system was cumbersome and often vexing, but if the technicians were well trained, it was far better than no system at all.
  24. determine
    establish after a calculation, investigation, or experiment
    Now, thanks to Bertillon, the police could determine if a man claiming to be John Reynolds was actually Jack the Ripper.
  25. outlandish
    noticeably or extremely unconventional or unusual
    Goron couldn’t simply arrest him and measure him on the basis of an outlandish theory.
  26. newfangled
    needlessly modern, different, or innovative
    The party would feature presentations on the latest scientific developments, including a newfangled invention called the cinematograph.
  27. subtly
    in a manner difficult to detect or grasp
    Goron subtly increased the pressure. “Ladies,” he said to a pair of American girls standing near Vernet, “please take him into custody and bring him to me.”
  28. treachery
    an act of deliberate betrayal
    About fifteen years before the Mona Lisa was stolen, the French government discovered a spy in its midst. Even worse, the spy was working for the German government, feeding the Germans information about the French military. It was treachery of the highest order.
  29. incriminating
    charging or suggestive of guilt or blame
    His job was to prove that Dreyfus’s handwriting matched the incriminating note, and he took the stand with a bewildering display of charts and pseudoscientific diagrams.
  30. irrefutable
    impossible to deny or disprove
    Another trial was held, and Bertillon testified again, with the same absolute conviction. “The proof is there, and it is irrefutable,” he told the court.
  31. gravely
    to a severe or serious degree
    Bertillon emerged from the whole affair with a gravely damaged reputation.
  32. installment
    a single part of a published serial
    Each new installment in their adventures sold as fast as it was printed.
  33. cunning
    marked by skill in deception
    Those fictional thieves—Lupin and Fantômas first among them—set a high standard. They were crafty and cunning; they were always several steps ahead of the law.
  34. refined
    cultivated and genteel
    Actual detectives like Lépine and Bertillon began to expect this sort of ingenuity from actual thieves, especially in the so-called superior, refined class of crimes.
  35. adversary
    someone who offers opposition
    Such thieves were noble adversaries. Any fool could solve a simple crime, the thinking went, but it would take a brilliant crime for a brilliant detective to truly show his worth.
  36. counterintuitive
    contrary to what common sense would suggest
    Locard didn’t fingerprint the organ-grinders. He fingerprinted the monkeys. He found an exact match.
    The monkey went to the zoo. The owner went to prison.
    In 1911, this sort of counterintuitive brilliance was expected of both thief and detective.
  37. whorl
    a round shape formed by a series of concentric circles
    Now he had a permanent record of the highly specific whorls and ridges. It was from a thumb, it turned out, and no other thumbprint would look just like it.
  38. implement
    pursue to a conclusion or bring to a successful issue
    It was incredibly difficult to implement: Different people measuring the same person sometimes got different measurements. It took time and skill to do well.
  39. rigorous
    demanding strict attention to rules and procedures
    Bertillon had made detective work aspire to scientific standards. His own work was supposed to be detached and rigorous.
  40. caricature
    a representation of a person exaggerated for comic effect
    He’d always been stubborn—that was clear from the Dreyfus affair—but now he was becoming a caricature of himself.
Created on Fri Jan 19 10:43:57 EST 2024 (updated Mon Jan 22 10:00:44 EST 2024)

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