The Mona Lisa Vanishes: List 5

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 "A Dangerous Woman"–"Epilogue."

Here are links to our lists for the book: List 1, List 2, List 3, List 4, List 5
40 words 49 learners

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Full list of words from this list:

words only definitions & notes
  1. cadaver
    the dead body of a human being
    Leonardo had dissected his first cadaver decades before. It quickly became an obsession. In a single Florence winter, he once dissected twenty bodies.
  2. exhaustive
    performed comprehensively and completely
    His notes from the dissection sessions are exhaustive. His drawings are astonishing. The sketches make you feel as if you’re looking into the cadaver alongside Leonardo—that this body has been opened up in front of you.
  3. succession
    a following of one thing after another in time
    In order to outline all the veins, he has to use several bodies in succession, because “a single body would not last long enough”; it decays so fast it becomes unusable.
  4. deter
    turn away from as by fear or persuasion
    “You will perhaps be deterred by the rising of your stomach,” he writes.
  5. ravenous
    extremely hungry
    His sublime portraits are partly the product of his time with ravenous flies and rotting bodies.
  6. flay
    strip the skin off
    To look at the Mona Lisa is to see Leonardo in the morgue, a flayed face in front of him, tracing the nerves and muscles that come together to make a smile.
  7. heretical
    departing from accepted beliefs or standards
    Dissection is forbidden by the Roman Catholic Church. It’s heretical—against the word of God.
  8. buoyant
    characterized by liveliness and lightheartedness
    The young, buoyant king of France is an intellectual, and a man of tremendous energy and curiosity.
  9. obscurity
    an unimportant and not well known standing
    Instead of sliding into obscurity, the Mona Lisa becomes a temptress.
    She becomes a dangerous woman. A mysterious woman. The woman we know today.
  10. contradiction
    opposition between two conflicting forces or ideas
    For Gautier, women are contradictions: gentle and manipulative, hot and cold, heaven and hell.
    When he looks at the Mona Lisa, he sees the same contradictory mix, and it intimidates him.
  11. enthralled
    filled with wonder and delight
    Above all, Gautier is enthralled with her expression, which “attracts you irresistibly and intoxicates you.”
  12. derision
    contemptuous laughter
    “The arc of her lips,” he adds elsewhere, “appears to be about to erupt into divine sarcasm, heavenly irony, angelic derision.”
  13. enigmatic
    not clear to the understanding
    But after reading Gautier, everyone sees a mystery there. Suddenly, her smile—no longer cheerful, now enigmatic—is the key to the whole painting.
  14. grapple
    work hard to come to terms with or deal with something
    An artist leaps to his death and blames the Mona Lisa: “For years I have grappled desperately with her smile,” he writes in a suicide note.
  15. alluring
    highly attractive and able to arouse hope or desire
    Before they came along, the Mona Lisa was “a portrait of a certain merchant’s wife in a cheerful mood,” as one historian put it. By the time Gautier and Pater were done, the Mona Lisa has been transformed. It’s no longer good-natured or innocent. It’s mysterious, alluring, unknowable.
  16. flurry
    a sudden and overwhelming outpouring or amount
    The investigation had gone cold too: after the flurry of excitement over Guillaume Apollinaire, there were no new arrests.
  17. authenticity
    undisputed credibility
    He said it appeared to be the portrait, but they’d need to be absolutely sure. To confirm its authenticity, they’d have to take the painting to the Uffizi.
  18. concierge
    a caretaker in an apartment complex or hotel
    On their way out of the Hotel Tripoli-Italia, the three were stopped by the hotel’s concierge, who accused them of having a stolen painting.
  19. dragnet
    a system of procedures for apprehending criminals
    Louis Lépine’s international dragnet—the trains stopped in Belgium, the Kaiser Wilhelm II searched in New York—had been for nothing.
  20. render
    give or supply
    “I have rendered outstanding service to Italy,” he complained. “I have given the country back a treasure of inestimable worth, and instead of being thankful, they throw me in jail. It’s the height of ingratitude.”
  21. insatiable
    impossible to fulfill, appease, or gratify
    In Italy, the appetite was insatiable.
  22. jubilation
    the utterance of sounds expressing great joy
    The Mona Lisa arrived in Paris to cheers and jubilation.
  23. proceeding
    a sequence of steps by which legal judgments are invoked
    The French never requested that Perugia be returned for trial, and it was unclear whether the Italians had the right to hold one. They did, but the court proceeding was mostly a glorified fact-finding inquiry.
  24. scrutiny
    the act of examining something closely, as for mistakes
    The panel of judges asked Perugia the questions everyone wanted answered anyway.
    Under scrutiny, his story began to fray.
  25. tarnish
    place under suspicion; make less respected
    His patriotic luster became tarnished.
  26. purloin
    make off with belongings of others
    Louis Lépine and Alphonse Bertillon had missed the lesson of the very first detective story: In Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Purloined Letter,” the suspect hides a scandalous letter in plain sight.
  27. magistrate
    a lay judge or civil authority who administers the law
    “I do not believe Perugia’s story of how he stole the Mona Lisa,” said a magistrate judge in charge of the investigation.
  28. preposterous
    inviting ridicule
    Meanwhile, the Louvre’s fired director announced that Perugia had been proven to be “a cunning madman. His misdeed and the preposterous explanation he gives seem to prove it.”
  29. grim
    shockingly repellent; inspiring horror
    The Mona Lisa was recovered just in time. A year later, the portrait might have vanished in the chaos of the war. Even if it had been found, the story of its recovery would have vanished, drowned out by grimmer realities.
  30. leonine
    of or characteristic of or resembling a lion
    He had a head of “leonine” white hair and an air of nobility.
  31. swindler
    a person who steals by means of deception or fraud
    Eduardo de Valfierno was an Argentine swindler. He’d done a little of everything, but he specialized in art forgeries. Working with a French forger named Yves Chaudron, Valfierno had conned widows and wealthy men across South America.
  32. baroque
    relating to an elaborately ornamented style of art and music
    The two specialized in religious paintings by a Spanish baroque painter named Murillo, and they presented their fakes as stolen Murillo masterpieces.
  33. fleece
    rip off; ask an unreasonable price
    They couldn’t sell the painting, because they knew the painting was stolen. The only person they could ask about the painting was Valfierno himself, the person swindling them. It was foolproof, and soon Valfierno and Chaudron left for Europe in search of even wealthier fools to fleece.
  34. exploit
    a notable achievement
    His exploits were notorious. (He once rescued a Cuban revolutionary beauty from prison just before the Spanish-American War broke out. That story was, remarkably, true.)
  35. prolific
    intellectually productive
    Pablo Picasso lived into his nineties, and when he died, his obituary ran on the front page of newspapers. “The most influential and prolific painter of the 20th century,” wrote the New York Daily News.
  36. titan
    a person of exceptional importance and reputation
    “The titan of 20th century art,” said the New York Times.
  37. farce
    an event or situation that is absurd, empty, or insincere
    But Picasso knew how he’d survived the Mona Lisa farce, and only near the end of his long life did he tell the truth about Apollinaire and the affaire des statuettes...
  38. inkling
    a slight suggestion or vague understanding
    She had no inkling of the bizarre afterlife that awaited her.
  39. parody
    make a spoof of or make fun of
    It’s the most parodied painting in history, but every parody just draws more attention to the original. When the French artist Marcel Duchamp drew a mustache on a copy of the Mona Lisa, he made the most famous parody in art history.
  40. dignitary
    an important or influential person
    The portrait no longer travels, but when it toured the United States in the 1960s, it was received like a visiting dignitary. It rode down empty highways in a fireproof, waterproof case, escorted by Secret Service agents.
Created on Fri Jan 19 10:44:26 EST 2024 (updated Sat Jan 20 14:16:52 EST 2024)

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