The Crimes of Paris: A True Story of Murder, Theft, and Detection (9 page)

Despite Sheedy’s claim, a popular historical novelist named Maurice Strauss published an article in one of France’s largest newspapers,
Le Figaro,
declaring that Worth was still alive and had duplicated his most famous crime by stealing the
Mona Lisa.
Strauss, who claimed to have seen Worth in 1901, reported that on reading the description provided by the museum plumber of the
Mona Lisa
’s thief (“a man of fifty years, handsome in feature, figure, and carriage, height a little above the average, the eyes keen and cold”), he was certain it must be Worth. “There is only one man in the world who would have acted with such tranquil audacity and so much dexterity,” Strauss wrote.
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The public (and numerous journalists) embraced the idea; many believed that for such a great crime to seem plausible, an equally great criminal must have perpetrated it.

Worth was quoted as once having said, “All that I ever require is two minutes of opportunity. If I do not find those two minutes, I give up the job. Usually I find them, and 120 seconds, methodically employed, is enough for a man well-trained in his specialty to accomplish a great deal.”
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That was just the way most Parisians imagined the daring robbery had been carried out. Indeed, the criminologist Bertillon, well known for approaching every case from a scientific viewpoint, had placed a replica of the
Mona Lisa
on the wall of the Salon Carré and checked how long it would take to remove it from the wall and carry it away. Two men not accustomed to such work took more than five minutes to do it. However, a museum employee who knew how the hooks were placed was able to do it by himself in only six seconds, well within Worth’s window of opportunity.
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Strauss himself was unusually specific about just how Worth had pulled off the heist: “It is he himself who carried off the ‘Joconde,’ and he did not have an accomplice. That is not his way. Nor did he take a train at the Quai d’Orsay terminus [closest stop to the Louvre]. After crossing the bridge, he turned to the left, with the picture under his arm, wrapped up in a piece of rep, traversed the Quai des Orfèvres, in front of the Prefecture of Police, and arrived at a friend’s house in the Marais where he removed his workman’s disguise. He hid his booty, the painted wooden panel, in the double bottom of his steamer trunk. Then, correctly clad as a gentleman traveler, he drove quickly in a taxicab to the Gare du Nord and got to London by way of Calais and Dover before Paris had sent its warnings to the English police.”
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Despite Strauss’s seeming confidence, police investigations failed to turn up any trace of the legendary criminal Worth.

Contributing to the view that professional thieves must have been behind the disappearance of the
Mona Lisa
was a book,
Manuel de Police Scientifique,
published in 1911 by Rodolphe Reiss, a professor at the University of Lausanne. Reiss had for a time served as an assistant to Bertillon at the identification service of the Prefecture of Police, and his book was graced with an introduction by the prefecture’s current head, Lépine, so journalists pored through it for indications as to what kind of man the police were searching for. Assuming the role of a criminal profiler, Reiss wrote:

There are two classes [of
pègres,
or thieves], between which there is a profound distinction in their bearing, their manner of life, their habits, and the kinds of crime in which they engage. The upper
pègre
reserves itself for the audacious, difficult, profitable thefts or frauds, and leaves the brutal and bloody crimes to the lower
pègre.
It is notable, in fact, that the great robbers never kill; it is rarely, indeed, that they go armed. They work most carefully, with even a refinement of art… and they never indulge in those savage and useless acts — the breaking of furniture or the slashing of pictures, for example — whereby the lower
pègre
satisfies its barbarous love of destruction. Thus the nature of the crime, the aspect of the scene, afford to the police an immediate clue to the class of malefactor. Even cunning imitation… is not long successful. The touch is not the same. The robber cannot divest himself of his particular habit of doing things, which has fixed itself upon him more and more firmly during his long years of malfeasance.
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That clearly pointed to someone of the same “class” as Worth.

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The theft continued to inspire newspaper stories for weeks; any report on the case, no matter how trivial, found its way into print, reflecting the fact that this was more than an ordinary crime. Among the newspapers’ favorite topics was, What accounted for the fascination that this particular painting holds over people?

The Renaissance artist Giorgio Vasari (1511–74), who became better known for his biographical accounts of other artists, was the first to report that the portrait depicted Mona Lisa,
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the young wife of Francesco del Giocondo, a citizen of Florence. According to Vasari, Leonardo worked on the painting for four years (today’s researchers date the period to 1503–6), but it remained unfinished, like so much of Leonardo’s other work. Leonardo took it with him when he traveled to France around 1517 at the invitation of King François I, an art lover and admirer. Leonardo died there two years later (a sentimental tradition has the king holding Leonardo in his arms at the artist’s death), and the painting, along with Leonardo’s other possessions, was left to Francesco Melzi, his friend and pupil. By the time Vasari wrote his book, around 1547, the painting had entered the collection of the French monarchy. (According to tradition, François I bought it from Melzi for four thousand gold florins. If the story is true, that was a considerable sum, for the king paid Leonardo about one-tenth that amount as an annual retainer.)

Vasari’s description of the painting is secondhand, and there are some discrepancies between it and the portrait as it exists — -leading some to question whether he was in fact describing the painting known as
Mona Lisa.
In any case, Vasari’s description shows that the painting had already acquired the nearly legendary reputation it has had ever since.

Anyone wishing to see the degree to which art can imitate nature can easily understand this from the head, for here Leonardo reproduced all the details that can be painted with subtlety. The eyes have the lustre and moisture always seen in living people, while around them are the lashes and all the reddish tones which cannot be produced without the greatest care. The eyebrows
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could not be more natural, for they represent the way the hair grows in the skin — thicker in some places and thinner in others, following the pores of the skin. The nose seems lifelike with its beautiful pink and tender nostrils. The mouth, with its opening joining the red of the lips to the flesh of the face, seemed to be real flesh rather than paint. Anyone who looked very attentively at the hollow of her throat would see her pulse beating: to tell the truth, it can be said that portrait was painted in a way that would cause every brave artist to tremble and fear, whoever he might be.
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The aura of mystery that gives the painting so much of its appeal arose from Leonardo’s technical innovations. The varnish Leonardo made for the final protective coat has darkened severely over the centuries, dulling the once-bright colors of the original. Though most of his contemporaries still used tempera (in which egg yolk is a binder agent), Leonardo adopted the oil-based paint developed in northern Europe. Oil colors were more luminous and allowed for greater precision in the final work. They also required patience, for each coat had to dry before another could be laid down. Modern X-rays of the
Mona Lisa
show that Leonardo applied many coats of paint, using a brush so fine that the individual strokes are virtually invisible. Finally, Leonardo employed a technique called sfumato (meaning smoky), in which the transitions of light and shade are blended subtly, as Leonardo wrote, “without lines or borders, in the manner of smoke.”
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Sfumato gave depth to the landscape in the background of the portrait, and a lifelike expression to the face of the sitter. Anyone observing the painting closely will see that the corners of the eyes and mouth are blurred, giving them a lifelike softness.

There are numerous copies of the
Mona Lisa
in existence, some modern but others dating to the time when the original was painted. Some critics argue that Leonardo actually painted more than one version. (If so, perhaps he fulfilled his agreement with Francesco del Giocondo and completed a portrait of his wife, but was so taken by his subject that he painted another that he continued to work on for years.) A
Gioconda
at the Hermitage in Saint Petersburg has an exposed breast and is thought to have been painted by Leonardo’s pupil and heir, Francesco Melzi. It was not uncommon for pupils to imitate their masters’ work in this way, nor would it have been unusual for one or more copies to be made, since there was no other way to increase the audience for a work of art. Donald Sassoon, a modern historian, has written, “We know that Leonardo was widely admired during his lifetime because of the number of copies made of his works. In an age when information about a painting could travel only through written comments and the production of copies, the activities of Leonardo’s followers… functioned as an information system which contributed to the expansion of his fame.”
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Vasari was also the first to note what has become the most commented-on feature of the painting: the smile. “Since Mona Lisa was very beautiful,” he wrote, “Leonardo employed this technique while he was painting her portrait — he had musicians who played or sang and clowns who would always make her merry in order to drive away her melancholy, which painting often brings to portraits. And in this portrait by Leonardo, there is a smile so pleasing that it seems more divine than human, and it was considered a wondrous thing that it was as lively as the smile of the living original.”
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Vasari never saw the actual painting. One contemporary who did was Antonio de Beatis, the secretary of an influential cardinal, who kept a journal of the cardinal’s trip to France in August 1517. They visited François I in his castle at Rouen, where Leonardo lived in an adjoining residence connected by a tunnel. De Beatis wrote that Leonardo showed his visitors three paintings, one the portrait of a “Florentine lady.” He describes them as “tucti perfectissimi” (“all of the greatest perfection”).
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A century later, when the painting was at Fontainebleau, the royal château that François I had renovated and expanded, Cassiano del Pozzo, an Italian scholar, came to view it. He wrote of it afterward as “the best-known work of this painter, because she lacks only the power of speech.”
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More important, he called the painting
La Gioconda,
confirming the sitter’s identity as Lisa Gherardini, who at the age of sixteen, in 1495, had married Francesco del Giocondo of Florence. The identification has been challenged over the years, but most authorities agree that the portrait is of this particular woman, who would have been in her mid-twenties when she sat for Leonardo.

During the reign of Louis XIV (1643–1715), the painting occupied a place of honor in the king’s personal gallery at the grand residence he built at Versailles. His successor, Louis XV (reigned 1715–74), however, preferred the more erotic, openly joyful works of such artists as Fragonard and Boucher and sent Leonardo’s work to hang ignominiously in the office of the keeper of the royal buildings. In 1750, the king’s courtiers selected the 110 best works of art in his collection for an exhibition.
La Joconde
was not included.

After the Revolution, the former royal palace known as the Louvre became a gallery open to all citizens, who could view the treasures formerly owned by kings and nobility. In 1797 the
Mona Lisa
was chosen to be one of the works displayed there. Ironically, Fragonard, once the court favorite, was now a lowly employee of the new regime’s artistic policy makers and was assigned to transport the
Mona Lisa
from Versailles to the Louvre. It didn’t remain there long, for when Napoleon Bonaparte took power, he ordered the painting to be hung in his bedroom. Later, after the Louvre was renamed the Musée Napoléon, he allowed the painting to be returned to public display. He was the last to enjoy such a personal relationship with the portrait until someone carried her off in August 1911.

vi

Tastes in art ebb and flow, and in the early part of the nineteenth century the
Mona Lisa
was not regarded with the same awe it enjoys today. Nor was Leonardo himself universally esteemed. William Hazlitt, an English critic, wrote in 1817 that Leonardo “vitiated his paintings with too much science.”
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At midcentury, a committee of experts was asked to give a monetary value to the Louvre’s works. The
Mona Lisa
was valued highly, at 90,000 francs, but well below works by other masters. Two of Raphael’s paintings, for example, were given price tags of 400,000 and 600,000 francs.
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