The Theft That Made the Mona Lisa Famous
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The most famous painting in the world wasn't always famous. But for all the Mona Lisa's history, there was more to the immortal cultural icon than meets the eye. So what happened in 1911 that would change the painting's exposure forever?
The Mona Lisa is a small painting with a big story. The real reason that it got absolute global fame was because of an incident that occurred in 1911 and the media exposure that followed. Vincent Perugia, it can be said, was the best PR agent the Mona Lisa ever had.
The theft of the Mona Lisa would permanently change how the world saw it. Transformed from a respected Renaissance portrait into an icon, the theft created a global media frenzy. To understand the theft and the theories that flourished, we are joined by historian and author Dominic Selwood. He will help guide us through one of the most influential and daring heists the art world has ever seen.
The Mona Lisa is a small painting with a big story. Itself, it is small. It's just 77 by 53 centimetres. And it's painted not onto canvas, but onto a panel of poplar wood. The painting shows a seated woman from the waist up. She's got her hands folded and she's turned slightly towards the viewer. Behind her, there's an imaginary atmospheric landscape of winding paths and distant mountains. The painting was begun in perhaps 1503 by none other than Leonardo da Vinci, and he continued to work on it for many years after beginning it. The woman in the picture is usually identified as Lisa Gerardini. Her husband was the Florentine merchant Francesco del Giocondo, so she's therefore known as La Gioconda, the feminised form of the name of her husband.
So her name was Lisa, and Mona is short for Madonna, so it actually means My Lady. So My Lady Lisa is what Mona Lisa means. In Italian, it's still La Gioconda, and in French, it's La Joconde. So one way or another, even though people think nobody knows who the sitter is, it's actually in the name in many languages.
The Mona Lisa was ahead of its time for 15th century Florence. Many things make it stand out. The sitter's gaze engages onlookers directly, holding eye contact. Unlike conventional portraits of submissive women at the time, She also wears no restrictive wedding jewelry or elaborate headdresses that often symbolized a woman being the property of her husband.
Leonardo was known for a technique called sfumato. And what that literally means is smoked or blurred. And Leonardo applied thin glazes to blur edges and transitions in his paintings. And one result is that the portrait feels soft and her expression seems endlessly changeable. And this is behind the enigmatic feel that the painting is often said to have, because it seems that her eyes and mouth are so softened that they allow for multiple readings by different viewers. 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.
Many conspiracy theories speculate that the painting hides coded symbols, secret societies, or religious messages. Modern imaging techniques, including infrared scanning, have revealed an underdrawing beneath the surface.
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