Vanished Smile

by R. A. Scotti

  The stolen work of Leonardo da Vinci is in my possession. It seems to belong to Italy since its painter was an Italian. My dream is to give back this masterpiece to the land from which it came and to the country that inspired it.

  —Leonardo.

  La Gioconda had been missing from the Louvre for more than two years, and in that time, Mona Lisa look-alikes had been popping up all over Europe. The international press reported each sighting, however bogus.

  Mona Lisa had been spotted crossing the border into Switzerland and slinking out of France at Le Havre and Dunkirk. She was glimpsed hopping a freight train headed for Holland by way of Namur, Liege, and Brussels, and seen boarding the steamer Cordillera, headed for South America. Police in Bordeaux, where the ship was docked, searched the steamer and delayed her departure but discovered no stowaway. Wrong ship, maybe. Mona Lisa was also reported boarding the S.S. La Champagne, bound for South America.

  In August, an obviously well-to-do English gentleman had burst into the British embassy in Paris one evening with a painting that he suspected might be the missing masterpiece. The flustered ambassador immediately called in the French authorities. Mona Lisa appeared authentic down to the slight crack near the top left corner of the panel. After subjecting the painting to a minute examination, a team of experts from the Ministry of Beaux Arts and the Louvre concluded unanimously that the age was right and the quality exceptional, but the Englishman's Mona Lisa was a copy.

  In September, a Russian newspaper reported that the stolen painting was hanging on the wall of a private gallery in St. Petersburg. She was sighted in New York City a few weeks later: On November i, The New York Times reported that the Secret Service had staked out an apartment on the corner of Intervale Avenue in the Bronx.

  It was almost inevitable that an offer for one of the false Mona Lisas would arrive in Alfredo Geri's morning mail. The dealer read the note again. When Mona Lisa disappeared, Corrado Ricci, Italy's foremost Renaissance scholar and the minister of art, had called for patience. Since the painting would be impossible to sell, Ricci had predicted, “The thief will eventually give himself away.” Two years of waiting had yielded only false hope. But if the waiting were over and Geri recovered the lost da Vinci, he would be a hero and an even wealthier man. Publicity, celebrity, and many lire would be his.

  Geri brought the letter to Giovanni Poggi, the director of the Uffizi Gallery. Poggi was even more skeptical. At best, the painting being offered might be a decent copy. Nevertheless, he advised Geri to write back, saying that he would have to see the painting to make an offer.

  “Leonardo” answered by return mail, inviting the dealer to visit him. Geri was a prudent man, and the vision of two Italians in Paris with the kidnapped painting alarmed him. He replied with a counter-offer, asking “Leonardo” to bring Mona Lisa to Italy and suggesting Milan as an intermediate locale. “Leonardo” was clearly impatient. He wanted to rendezvous immediately, but the dates he proposed were confusing. After a flurry of correspondence, and with a creeping sense that the affair was an elaborate prank, Geri set a firm date. They would meet in Milan in two weeks, on December 22, three days before Christmas. In the meantime, he tried to put “Leonardo” out of his mind.

  On Wednesday, December 10, the shop on Via Borgo Ognissanti was unusually crowded. One customer stood out from the usual clientele. He browsed through the antiques leisurely, as if he had time to kill. After Geri had ushered out the other customers, the man introduced himself. “Leonardo” had brought Mona Lisa home to Florence.

  By all accounts, the true Leonardo had been a Renaissance hunk—tall and graceful, with gracious manners. His stand-in was an entirely different type—vain, slightly unctuous, inclined to preen. Probably in his early thirties, he was a slight, edgy man, not more than five feet three inches, with a dark complexion, slick pomaded black hair, and a handlebar mustache waxed at the tips. His demeanor was ingratiating; the cut of his suit was cheap. He said that he was registered as Leonardo Vincenzo at the Albergo Tripoli-Italia on Via Panzani, a short walk away. The hotel was in the vicinity of the Borgo San Lorenzo, a few blocks from the Renaissance home where Lisa del Giocondo had sat for the true Leonardo.

  Caught off guard by the unexpected turn of events, Geri asked “Leonardo” to come back the next day at three o'clock, He knew the Uffizi director was in Bologna, and he did not want to examine Mona Lisa alone. Geri immediately telegraphed Director Poggi, who rushed back to Florence. When he arrived at the shop the next afternoon at three o'clock, Geri was alone. The dealer had his gold pocket watch out and was glued to the excruciatingly slow movement of the hands. Time ticked by—five minutes, seven minutes, ten minutes.

  Director Poggi had been wary from the start. Now the entire episode appeared to be one more chapter in Mona Lisa's tangled history. As he put on his coat to return to the Uffizi, “Leonardo” appeared. The director was a reserved man, not given to displays of emotion. Even with familiars, his manners were formal. “Leonardo” never hesitated. He grasped Poggi's hand in both of his and pumped it with enthusiasm, saying how glad he was to shake the hand of the man entrusted with the art treasure of Florence.

  The winter light was fading when the three men began to walk together, north along Via del Moro in the general direction of Santa Maria Novella, to the Albergo Tripoli-Italia. Poggi and Geri had grown nervous waiting, and their apprehension deepened as they approached the hotel. “Leonardo” seemed oblivious. It was his first trip to Florence, and like a tourist on holiday, he sauntered along, taking in the sights around him.

  At some point in the course of the afternoon, the conversation turned from art to commerce. Memories were selective and contradictory, and which man was the more honest may have been a question of degree. According to Geri, “Leonardo” raised the subject of payment before they left the shop. “‘Leonardo’ answered all my questions with much assurance and told me he wanted five hundred thousand lire, equivalent to $2.14 million today, for his picture,” Geri said. “I said I was prepared to pay this sum, if she was, in truth, the eternal Gioconda.”

  According to “Leonardo,” Geri proposed the payment as they were walking to the hotel. While admitting that he expected the Italian government to compensate him “for the great service rendered,” “Leonardo” insisted, “I did not take the picture through a desire for gain, but wished to accomplish a good and holy work by returning to my country one of the many treasures stolen from it.”

  Whichever account is the true one, by the time they arrived at the hotel, an agreement had been reached to ransom Mona Lisa for the sum proposed. It remained only for Director Poggi to identify her unequivocally.

  The Tripoli-Italia was as shabby and shopworn as a secondhand suit, and “Leonardo's” room was on the third floor, up two steep flights. Conversation evaporated on the climb. The single room was barely large enough for a bed and an armoire, let alone three men, two of them on the portly side. As Geri and Poggi crowded in, “Leonardo” locked the door behind them and, without a word, dragged a case from under the bed. It was white wood of medium size.

  In the cramped, silent room, the smallest sound seemed amplified: the bolt snapping in the door, the scrape of the case on the bare floor, the complaint of the springs as “Leonardo” heaved the box onto the bed. He opened it and began dumping out the contents, all “wretched objects,” Geri would say. Woolen underwear, rumpled shirts, a pair of worn-down shoes, a squashed hat, a mandolin, and a few tools piled up on the floor. “Leonardo” had even packed some paintbrushes. When his meager possessions were strewn across the floor, he lifted a false bottom in the case. Under it was a package bundled in red silk, which he placed on the bed. Still without a word, “Leonardo” began to unwrap it.

  Geri described the moment: “To our amazed eyes, the divine Gioconda appeared intact and marvelously preserved. We carried it to a window to compare it to a photograph we had brought with us. Poggi studied it and we had no doubt the painting was authentic. The Louvre catalogue numbe
r and brand on the back matched the photograph.”

  While admitting that she appeared to be the genuine article, Director Poggi expressed reservation. He would have to bring Mona Lisa back to the Uffizi and study the painting beside other works by da Vinci before he could validate its authenticity. “Leonardo” agreed without argument.

  With Mona Lisa once again wrapped in her red silk mantle, Poggi and Geri carried her down the stairs. They knew they had the true Mona Lisa in their arms. Although they had contained their excitement in front of her kidnapper, they were practically running, afraid “Leonardo” would change his mind and come after them. As they fled past the front desk with their package, the concierge stopped them and insisted on seeing what they had concealed in the red silk. The thief had walked out of the Louvre carrying Mona Lisa with no questions asked, but the director of the Uffizi was stopped trying to leave the Albergo Tripoli-Italia and accused of filching a second-rate reproduction from one of the rooms. “If the guardians of the Louvre had had the same curiosity,” Geri would say, “the Gioconda would never have come to Florence.”

  Once they were safely free of the hotel, Poggi called in the carabinieri. “Leonardo” was napping, his sorry belongings still in a mess on the floor, when the chief of the Florence police, Francesco Tarantelli, knocked on his hotel room door. The momentous arrest, two years in coming, was made with no fireworks. “Leonardo” submitted without a whimper. He was confident that his arrest was simply a formality. The Italian government had to put on a public show of anger, then he would be released, handsomely rewarded, and hailed as a national hero.

  At the Uffizi, Director Poggi telegraphed Corrado Ricci in Rome. The Renaissance scholar and minister of art was on the next rapida to Florence. Together, he and Poggi examined the panel minutely. The more closely they studied it, the more excited they became. The lost Leonardo had been found. Both men would stake their reputations on it. Mona Lisa had come full circle. She was recovered in Florence, where her life began, only slightly the worse for wear. There was a bruise on one cheek and a small scratch on her left shoulder. Otherwise, she was in remarkably good shape for her four hundred years.

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  KING VICTOR EMMANUEL, Pope Pius X, and the French ambassador Camille Barrere received personal phone calls with the astounding news. In the Italian Chamber of Deputies, a fistfight was interrupted. Someone shouted: “La Gioconda ha trovato!”—Mona Lisa has been found!—and fisticuffs turned to abbracci.

  Like the robbery, the recovery dominated the news:

  LA GIOCONDA DI LEONARDO DA VINCI

  RECUPERATA DOPO DUE ANNI

  LA CONFERMA UFFICIALE

  LEONARDO DA VINCI'S MONA LISA

  RECOVERED AFTER TWO YEARS

  CONFIRMATION IS OFFICIAL

  “The lost is found!” echoed from north to south. Within twenty-four hours, Gioconda frenzy was electrifying Italy.

  Mona Lisa's sudden reappearance was as astounding as her loss. The most famous face in the world, unseen for more than two years, had miraculously reappeared a few blocks from the house where Leonardo da Vinci had begun painting her. When the police apprehended the thief, he had a train ticket stub and a single franc in his pocket. Submitting proudly to arrest, he proclaimed himself a national savior.

  “Leonardo” cooperated fully and eagerly with the police. His true identity was Vincenzo Peruggia, thirty-two years old, born on October 8, 1881, in the small town of Dumenza, near Lake Como. His Paris address was 5 Rue de l'Hôpital Saint-Louis. While the Paris police had been combing the world in search of a mastermind, a madman, or a millionaire, Mona Lisa had never strayed far from home. The divine Gioconda, whose address had always been one royal palace or another,∗1 had been holed up in the heart of Paris in a cheap room, less than two miles from the Louvre and just a short distance from the Montmartre headquarters of the Picasso gang.

  Peruggia was not a romantic dreamer, a young Goethe, a reincarnated Adam Lux, a rapacious American millionaire, or an avant-garde artist. Except for the fact that he had abducted Leonardo's masterpiece, Vincenzo Peruggia was a thoroughly inconsequential man, a petty crook and sometime house-painter who had worked as a glazier at the Louvre for two years, and the story he told was stranger than all the fantasies concocted to explain the heist. Peruggia portrayed himself as a patriot who had kidnapped Mona Lisa to avenge “the splendid plunder” that poured into France from the emperor Napoleon's Italian Expeditions. According to Peruggia's spurious history, Napoleon had stolen Mona Lisa from Italy, and he had stolen her back to right the wrong.

  Florence was jubilant. The Albergo Tripoli-Italia changed its name to Hotel la Gioconda. Minister Ricci said, “I feel convinced that the thief did not spirit la Gioconda to Florence, but that it was la Gioconda who brought him here and has been the ravisher.” An American visitor, Carolyn Apperson Leech, wrote in her diary: “The year 1913 has added another date to Florentine history. By the evening of December 12, the names of Peruggia, the thief; Signor Geri, the art dealer; Signor Poggi, Director of the Uffizi Gallery; and Commendatore Ricci, the Italian Minister of Fine Arts, were as familiar as the names of friends.”

  If the mood in Italy was euphoric, the mood in France was incredulous. The government, the investigators, the museum officials, the press, and the public—all were skeptical. A Louvre curator, interrupted during dinner with a phone call, responded, “Impossible!,” hung up, and returned to his meal. Magistrate Drioux, for reasons sincere or self-serving, dismissed Peruggia's story out of hand. He did not accept that an Italian “macaroni” was the lone thief. “I do not believe Peruggia's story of how he stole Mona Lisa,” the judge said. “It does not fit into the facts as we know them.”

  Of the three most involved in the investigation, Drioux was the only one still working. After twenty years, Louis Lépine had retired as prefect of the Seine the previous March, and Alphonse Bertillon was dying. The fabled criminologist had been seriously sick since October, but he was spending his final months working on a plan to end the plague of art forgery.

  One of the few happy Frenchmen was the ousted Louvre director Homolle. The day after Mona Lisa's recovery, he said: “It will fill with gladness the hearts of all the true artists of the world. I believe, and I think my belief will be shared by the public, that the theft was the act of a cunning madman. His misdeed and the preposterous explanation he gives seem to prove it.”

  Peruggia did not appear either cunning or mad. He basked in his role as hero-thief and spoke freely and often, giving numerous interviews, detailing his motive and method:

  I was ashamed that for more than a century no Italian had thought of avenging the spoliation committed by Frenchmen under Napoleon when they carried off from Italian museums and galleries pictures, statues and treasures of all kinds by wagonloads, ancient manuscripts by thousands, and gold by sackfulls. Many times, while working in the Louvre, I stopped before da Vinci's picture and was humiliated to see it there on foreign soil. I thought it would be a great thing for Italy were I to present the wonderful masterpiece to her, so I planned the theft.

  More than one hundred years may seem a long while to hold a grudge, but history has shown again and again that collective memories are long. Italy's gripe with Napoleon was only a century old. In the context of European history, the humiliation was still fresh. If asked, “Are the French all thieves?,” an Italian would invariably answer, “Non sono tutti i francese, ma bonaparte”—not all the French are, but a Bonaparte.

  Grateful Italians embraced the hero-thief as Italy's Don Quixote. Mona Lisa became his Dulcinea. An anonymous man offered to pay five thousand lire ($1,000) for Peruggia's bail, and his jail cell filled with admiring letters, gifts, cigarettes, and sweets. The poet and novelist Gabriele D'Annunzio, never one to shun the limelight, rushed into print with a tribute:

  He who dreamed of honor and grandeur; he the avenger of Napoleonic thefts; he who kept Leonardo's la Gioconda in Paris for two years, deceiving the French police, and then took her acr
oss the border back to Florence. Do you understand? Back to Florence where she was born, near Palazzo Vecchio, by the sounds of the bells of Giotto's campanile, able to see the cypresses of San Miniato. … Only a poet, a great poet, could dream such a dream.

  D'Annunzio would play a bizarre and questionable role in the Mona Lisa affair. He might have been simply blowing his own horn, or he might have been a conduit in a political morality play. D'Annunzio claimed a number of roles for himself, his part changing with Mona Lisa's misadventures. In 1905 or 1906, D'Annunzio wrote a play called La Gioconda, in which a sculptor has an affair with his muse. In 1911, when Mona Lisa vanished, he was living in Paris at the Hotel Meurice, and in 1913 he was living in Florence with Eleonora Duse, where they were customers of Alfredo Geri. A few days before Mona Lisa was recovered, D'Annunzio announced that la Gioconda would be returning to Florence. When Peruggia was arrested, D'Annunzio paid lavish tribute to the hero-thief. Later, the writer claimed that he had orchestrated both the theft and the return.

  While it seems another inspired fiction, D'Annunzio evidently convinced himself that his scenario was true. In 1920 he wrote, “The sublime stealer of the Mona Lisa brought the panel, wrapped in an old horse blanket, to me in my retreat in Landes, France.” The claim sounds delusional, and D'Annunzio further undermined his own strained story by claiming that Peruggia, whom the court-appointed psychiatrist would diagnose as “mentally deficient,” engaged him in “metaphysical speculations” for an entire day.

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