The Mona Lisa Vanishes: List 4

“It is generally conceded,” Louis Lépine noted, “that even a dull person would realize the impossibility of selling such a famous work.”

This was the end of the Gilded Age, a time when fortunes were amassed overnight, and the new twentieth century was awash in new money.

Because from here, we can look down through the last century and see the fallout of a single theory: the Rich American commissioning a Consummate Professional to steal a Great Painting.
Because of this theory, stealing art became different from other sorts of stealing. It became a mark of sophistication. It became glamorous.

Today, the Rich, Consummate Professional appears in many movies. He steals paintings to enjoy in the privacy of his mansion. He’s dashing and handsome, and he wears a well-tailored suit that fails to hide his muscles.

Art heists are almost always the work of amateurs, and there’s nothing dashing or romantic about these thieves. They have no mansions or polo ponies. They’re more likely to bungle the job than get it right.

A week later, a ransom letter arrived. It began: “Query not that I have the Goya.”

Such ornate language, people said, meant that the thieves must be men of intelligence and sophistication.

It was the premier art gallery in London, a sober, serious place. At least it was on the surface. Underneath, it was a ruthless, relentless business.

Before showing a painting, the Duveens would apply a heavy coat of varnish to it. Their clients were vain; they were delighted to see themselves in a masterpiece.

He has money. He has promise. He can choose any number of girls flush with cash from prominent families.

Inside that circle are the homes of Raphael, Michelangelo, Botticelli—and the list of luminaries goes on.

Leonardo’s life is extremely irregular and haphazard, and he seems to live from day to day.

Cesare Borgia is a high-ranking Catholic official and the son of a future pope. But he is not a humble, religious man. He is a monster. He’s greedy, cruel, remorseless; he killed his own brother.

Back in Florence, he hears from a silk merchant who wants a portrait of his wife. And in 1503, Leonardo, after turning down far more prestigious commissions, after expressing little interest in painting at all, says yes to Francesco del Giocondo.

Why did he focus all his skill and imagination on this diminutive portrait of a wife and mother?

But she acts like she belongs there. She’s not shy or meek. She makes eye contact. This is exactly how Florentine women are taught not to behave, and it is also how Leonardo himself taught not to paint them.

He wrote that women should be painted with “their heads lowered and inclined to one side.”

In order to stay famous, though, the painting needed the limelight. It needed to stay on the front page and in the public eye.

A reporter met with the young man who’d sent the letter—the paper described him as having “a kind heart and a certain lack of scruple.”

So the Paris-Journal assigned the thief to tell his own story. His escapades, it turned out, had begun years before...

It was at that moment that I suddenly realized how easy it would be to pick up and take away almost any object of moderate size.

Apollinaire claimed to have a high aristocratic background—he also claimed his father was a cardinal or a pope—but if so, there was no money left.

He became a sort of mascot in Montmartre, his seedy, beloved neighborhood.

“Guillaume was extraordinarily brilliant,” said the American writer Gertrude Stein, who knew everyone on the Parisian scene, “and no matter what subject was started, if he knew anything about it or not, he quickly saw the whole meaning of the thing and elaborated it by his wit and fancy carrying it further than anybody knowing anything about it could have done, and oddly enough generally correctly.”

Wearing grubby blue overalls, the uniform of an electrician, Picasso slept by day and worked by night, with a smoldering sort of discipline.

Wearing grubby blue overalls, the uniform of an electrician, Picasso slept by day and worked by night, with a smoldering sort of discipline.

It was a loud, intoxicating place. Guests stopped by constantly, trying to make sense of this new world he was putting down on canvas.

Their work was shocking and confrontational. Looking at it required effort. Even Braque thought they might have gone too far. Before he joined with Picasso, he criticized cubism as too aggressive.

They were a perfect pair: Picasso couldn’t talk, but he could paint like no one else; Apollinaire couldn’t paint, but he could talk like no one else. Together, they completed each other. Their fame rose in tandem.

France had a vast colonial empire: at the turn of the twentieth century, it stretched across almost all of west and central Africa. It was a violent, racist endeavor, and the French stripped their colonies of anything they found remarkable or valuable.

The masks Picasso saw—expressive, sharply featured, wholly new—were in fact recent works of art, and they were brilliantly innovative.

Picasso lived in a decrepit apartment, and he’d painted a massive work no one could stomach.

Still, Picasso believed in his vision, and he believed that the future would vindicate him.

They worked on the edges, making art that few people understood or liked. They were far from the establishment, far from anyone who could protect them. And they were connected to people who wanted to overthrow that establishment: anarchists.

“We are on the trail of a gang of international thieves who came to France for the purpose of despoiling our museums,” a police spokesman announced.

Languishing in jail, still wearing his wool suit, Apollinaire was charged with the theft of the Mona Lisa.

Picasso picked out a red-and-white polka-dotted shirt and a clashing tie. It was a statement of defiance, like a matador dressing for the bull ring.

Picasso looked at him and saw a stranger—he’d never seen the dapper, dignified poet look like this.

He even admitted that, years ago, he’d signed a manifesto that called for the Louvre to be burned to the ground.

He stayed indoors, leaving his apartment only at night, switching taxis to elude anyone following him.