The myth of the Mona Lisa by Charles Nicholl

London Review of Books

The myth of the Mona Lisa (by Charles Nicholl)

She's a global icon, celebrated in songs, poetry and Pop Art. Yet, 500 years after Leonardo da Vinci painted the Mona Lisa, we are no closer to unravelling the mystery surrounding the phenomenon. In the latest exclusive online essay from the London Review of Books, Charles Nicholl considers the enduring appeal of the world's most famous portrait.

(Charles Nicholl is writing a biography of Leonardo da Vinci.)

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2002/mar/28/londonreviewofbooks

Thu 28 Mar 2002 18.29 GMT

Mona Lisa: The History of the World's Most Famous Painting by Donald Sassoon. HarperCollins, 350 pp., £16.99, 17 September 2001, 0 00 710614 9

Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa may be 'the world's most famous painting' but almost everything about it is obscure. We don't know precisely when it was painted, we don't know for certain who she is, and as we stare at her puzzling features for the umpteenth time we are inclined to ask ourselves: what is it about her? It is that question, in all its historical and cultural ramifications, which is addressed in Donald Sassoon's elegant and comprehensive study of the Mona Lisa phenomenon.

(…)

The other life-changing event in the career of the Mona Lisa was her abduction from the Louvre on the morning of Monday, 21 August 1911. The thief was a 30-year-old Italian painter-decorator and petty criminal, Vincenzo Peruggia. Born in the village of Dumenza, near Lake Como, he had been in Paris since 1908, one of thousands of Italian immigrants in the city: 'les macaroni', as the French dubbed them. He had worked briefly at the Louvre, which was why he was able to get into the building unchallenged - and out again, carrying the Mona Lisa stuffed under his workman's smock. A police hunt ensued, but despite his criminal record, and despite having left a large thumb-print on the frame, Peruggia's name never came up. Among those suspected of involvement were Picasso and Apollinaire; the latter was imprisoned briefly, and wrote a poem about it. Peruggia kept the painting in his lodgings, hidden under a stove, for more than two years. Then, in late November 1913, he sent a letter to an antique-dealer in Florence, Alfredo Geri, offering to 'return' the Mona Lisa to Italy. He demanded 500,000 lire. The letter was signed: 'Leonardo Vincenzo', with a PO box number in the place de la Republique in Paris. On 12 December, Peruggia arrived in Florence, by train, with the Mona Lisa in a wooden trunk, "a sort of seaman's locker"; he checked into a low-rent hotel, the Albergo Tripoli-Italia on via Panzani (still in business, though now called - what else? - the Hotel La Gioconda). Here, in the presence of Alfredo Geri and Giovanni Poggi, the director of the Uffizi, Peruggia opened the trunk, revealing some old shoes and woollen underclothes, and - as Geri relates - "after taking out these not very appetising objects" he "lifted up the false bottom of the trunk, under which we saw the picture . . . We were filled with a strong emotion. Vincenzo looked at us with a kind of fixed stare, smiling complacently, as if he had painted it himself." He was arrested later that day. Efforts were made to turn Peruggia into a cultural hero - Gabriele d'Annunzio was as vocal as usual - but at his trial he proved a disappointment. He said he had first intended to steal Mantegna's Mars and Venus, but had decided on the Mona Lisa instead because it was smaller. He was imprisoned for 12 months; he died in 1947.

A police hunt ensued: A hunt is a chase or search. If something ensues, it happens immediately after another event, usually as a result of it.

Lodgins: If you live in lodgings, you live in a room or rooms in someone's house and you pay them for this.

Stove: A piece of equipment which provides heat, either for cooking or for heating a room.

Wooden trunk: Wooden box

Vocal: You say that people are vocal when they speak forcefully about something that they feel strongly about.

Mantegna’s Parnasus:      159 cm × 192 cm Gioconda:                             77 cm × 53 cm

The theft and recovery of the Mona Lisa were, in Sassoon's view, the clinching of her international celebrity. Both unleashed a swarm of newspaper features, commemorative postcards, cartoons, ballads, cabaret-revues and comic silent films. These are the heralds of the painting's modern existence as global pop-icon. Marcel Duchamp's defaced Gioconda of 1919, saucily entitled LHOOQ (i.e. 'Elle a chaud au cul', or 'she's hot in the arse') is the most famous of the send-ups, though it is predated by more than twenty years by the pipe-smoking Mona Lisa, drawn by the illustrator Sapeck (Eugene Bataille). And so the way is open for the endless versions: for Warhol's multiple Gioconda (Thirty Are Better than One); for Terry Gilliam's animated Gioconda in the Monty Python title sequence; for William Gibson's 'sprawl novel' Mona Lisa Overdrive; for the classic citations in Cole Porter's You're the Top, Nat 'King' Cole's Mona Lisa and Bob Dylan's Visions of Johanna; for the spliff-smoking poster and the novelty mouse-pad. 

Personally I suspect that I first became aware of the Mona Lisa through the Jimmy Clanton hit of c.1960, which began:

'She's Venus in blue jeans,

Mona Lisa with a pony tail.'

This allusion seems to have escaped the net of Sassoon's compendious research, though its wonderful bubblegum blandness illustrates well enough the fate that has befallen this mysterious and beautiful painting.

Clinch: Definitive

Unleashed: Start suddenly

Swarm: To be filled or crowded. In other sense a swarm of bees or other insects is a large group of them flying together.

Sprawl: In William Gibson's fiction, the Sprawl is a colloquial name for the Boston-Atlanta Metropolitan Axis (BAMA), an urban sprawl environment on a massive scale, and a fictional extension of the real Northeast megalopolis.

Spliff: A spliff is a cigarette which contains cannabis or marijuana.

Befall: If something bad or dangerous befalls you, it happens to you