Dominic Selwood
speaker
436 appearances
4 recordings
1 series
first heard Jun 2026
last heard 8 Sep
Dominic Selwood’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 4 in all, peaking in Sep 2026 with 1.
Appearances
Because the painting is by Leonardo, of course, there are a huge number of theories about what it may contain.
Obviously, as a work of art, it's extraordinary in and of itself, with Leonardo's style, the background, the subject matter.
But what people have projected into it, of course, is a lot of the mysteries around Leonardo, who's often tied to many things that come up in theories about hidden structures, concealed and esoteric knowledge.
But so far, there's been no finding of anything of that kind underneath the painting.
The fame of the picture is partly that it was painted by Leonardo, but partly also because of the aesthetics of the picture.
However, the real reason that it got absolute global fame was because of an incident that occurred in 1911 and the media exposure that followed.
Leonardo originally painted the picture in Florence.
But then he took it to France when he went there.
And the King of France, François I, bought it in 1518 and he put it into his royal collection.
It stayed in that royal collection for centuries, travelling around the various royal residences like Fontainebleau and Versailles.
It finally became public property during the Revolution and it's been in the Louvre now for centuries.
Vincent Perugia was a 30-year-old Italian, working-class migrant living in Paris.
He worked for the Louvre as a glazier, painter, and handyman.
The Louvre was closed on Monday, August 21st, 1911, as it was on most Mondays.
It seems that Perugia maybe entered with other workers that morning or had possibly been hidden in the museum the night before.
At five foot three, he was a smallish man and so able to have secreted himself in various cupboards or small spaces in the museum.
The Louvre at the time didn't have many guards, perhaps only around 150, but the collection and the space was already vast, so it was under-guarded.
On that Monday morning, Perugia made for the Salon Carré, which is the room where the Mona Lisa was held, and he just lifted it off the wall.
He then took it into a service staircase and threw away the frame, so was just left with the board with the painting on it.
He hid the painting under his white Regulation Louvre employee's smock that he was wearing,
Showing 181–200 of 436 · page 10 of 22
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