Vanished Smile: The mysterious theft of the Mona Lisa (Vintage)
Vanished Smile: The mysterious theft of the Mona Lisa (Vintage)
August 21, 1911, the most famous painting by Leonardo da Vinci Louvre disappeared. The prime suspects were as shocking as the crime: Pablo Picasso & Guillaume Apollinaire, provocative young of a new art.
sensational act disappear captured the imagination of the world. The crowd lined up into view the empty space on the museum wall. Thousands more were expected, as anxious as if Mona Lisa was a missing person, news of the lost painting. Almost a century later, the questions
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Tags: Lisa, Mona, mysterious, Smile, Theft, Vanished, Vintage
August 20th, 2010 at 10:40 am
Review by Malvin for Vanished Smile: The Mysterious Theft of the Mona Lisa (Vintage)
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“Vanished Smile” by R.A. Scotti is a fascinating account of the theft of Leonardo da Vinci’s ‘Mona Lisa’ from the Musee de Louvre in 1911. A skilled writer who has previously produced both fiction and nonfiction books, Ms. Scotti is true to the historic specificity of the events but tells the tale with the verve and intrigue of a first-rate crime novelist. The result is an engrossing and entertaining read that should appeal to a wide audience, especially all those interested in art, history, or real-life mysteries.
Ms. Scotti leads us through the bizarre sequence of events that surrounded this, the crime of the 20th century. We become acquainted with an array of colorful personalities, from museum curators, petty criminals, forgers, police detectives and famous individuals including Guillaume Apollinaire and Pablo Picasso. We are taken back to a time where we understand how the unfolding drama captivated international audiences and ultimately helped to elevate the Mona Lisa to its present status as the world’s most well-known painting.
Sandwiched between her narrative, Ms. Scotti includes an absorbing profile and short history of Leonardo and the Mona Lisa. She discusses the artists’ life and times as well as his innovative painting techniques that combined to produce one of the most enduring works of art. The shrewd placement of this excursus in the middle of the text serves to heighten the suspense if not deepen the reader’s appreciation of the Mona Lisa as both a brilliant technical achievement and cultural icon.
In the latter part of the book, Ms. Scotti relates how the perpetrator was finally apprehended while suggesting that unknown others may well have been involved in the heist. Ms. Scotti successfully invokes the enduring mystery about the crime, retelling a washed-up journalist’s fanciful yarn that suggests there may have been far more to the story than has been generally recognized. As the author recounts how the Mona Lisa was eventualy recovered and later toured the world to great acclaim, she tantalizingly suggests that the full truth surrounding the theft of the Mona Lisa remains as mysterious to us today as her timelessly captivating and enigmatic smile.
I highly recommend this book to everyone.
August 20th, 2010 at 10:48 am
Review by P. Eisenman for Vanished Smile: The Mysterious Theft of the Mona Lisa (Vintage)
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R. A. Scotti makes history FUN! VANISHED SMILE: THE MYSTERIOUS THEFT OF MONA LISA reads like a who-dunnit mystery. She starts with the 1911 theft, then follows along with the investigation as conducted by French officials. Never letting on as to the who as she tells the story of the how. False trails lead to the implication of Pablo Picasso! But, two years later the real thief emerges from the shadows.
I won’t spoil the ending for you! R.A. Scotti examines contempory as well as later theories as to the WHY of the theft. Included along the way, you’ll find lots of information about the history of the Mona Lisa and her creator, Leonardo da Vinci. All of which makes for a fast paced, interesting jaunt through one of history’s little “side-shows.”
Perhaps, like me, you’d never heard about “l’Affaire de la Joconde.” It’s a story worth learning. One of those strange tales that could happen in ONLY real life!
I give VANISHED SMILE by R.A. Scotti FIVE STARS!! Great writing style, a marvelous story, and thought provoking discussion of the possible “unknowns” of the entire case and history of the Mona Lisa. A few illustrations help the story along. As I said, it reads more like a who-dunnit mystery than a non-fiction history book. This is a book that anybody who likes art, Da Vinci, history or mystery could enjoy. Worthwhile, enjoyable reading.
August 20th, 2010 at 10:59 am
Review by Dick Johnson for Vanished Smile: The Mysterious Theft of the Mona Lisa (Vintage)
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Though the mastermind behind the theft of the Mona Lisa nearly a century ago may never be known, this book is a well written presentation of the event.
It’s not often that “page-turner” and “non-fiction” are used together, but this is both. Scotti’s style is to tell the story without unnecessary embellishment. It flowed nicely and the pieces of the puzzle fit together well.
She provides a needed sketch of da Vinci plus the birth and development of the Mona Lisa. She also gives us a fascinating look at the four hundred years of the painting’s travels and travails leading up to the theft; as well as its last hundred years’ journies.
This book held my attention throughout, and though it is not a long book but it was long enough to treat the story in sufficient detail. This was certainly entertaining and I highly recommend it.
August 20th, 2010 at 11:15 am
Review by David J. Loftus for Vanished Smile: The Mysterious Theft of the Mona Lisa (Vintage)
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Not quite a century ago, on August 29, 1911, thousands of people began flocking to the Louvre (among them, Franz Kafka and his friend Max Brod) to gaze at a blank space on a wall. The 49-acre Louvre – still the largest museum in the world today – had been closed for most of the preceding week for the investigation of a singular occurrence: the most famous painting in the world had disappeared from that blank spot.
Vanished Smile relates the tale of the theft of the Mona Lisa, after which the painting remained missing for more than two years. Along the way, author Scotti digresses pleasantly into the history of the painting, the antics of two famous suspects (the poet Guillaume Apollinaire and his buddy in mischief Pablo Picasso), and the supposed “real story” of the heist and the reason it was pulled.
Scotti writes that the painting was not particularly well known for several centuries, mostly because it was kept hidden away in the bathrooms and bedrooms of French kings and Napoleon. Its value appreciated significantly during the 19th century due to the praises of Romantic poets and critics, and by 1911 it was worth perhaps $5 million (the equivalent of $112.5 million in current dollars).
At the time of its disappearance, security at the Louvre was next to nonexistent. Only retired non-commissioned officers of the French Army could apply to be guards. There was no alarm system, and a hundred passkeys in circulation were capable of opening every door in the place. Though protected by glass, La Gioconda could be moved by anyone to another room for photographing, as paintings often were, and no one signed them in or out. Unconcerned museum staff waited hours to raise the alarm after she turned up missing.
After 13 months, the painting was given up as lost forever. It was only in November 1913 that a petty Italian crook and house painter offered it for sale to a Florentine art dealer, whose scruples led to the thief’s arrest. Though Vincenzo Peruggia tried to portray himself as an Italian patriot who had brought a masterpiece home where it belonged (his apartment was only a few blocks from where Leonardo had painted the work 400 years before), he was jailed and the painting returned to France.
Peruggia ended up serving less than a year for the crime, and lived a long and happy, crime-free life after that. But no one seems to believe his story that he acted alone.
But if he didn’t do it all by himself, then who masterminded the theft, and why?
Scotti makes another sizable digression to trace the life of the “Marquès Eduardo de Valfierno” and his plan to make six fake copies of the Mona Lisa for clandestine sale to American millionaires (“Morgan, Mellon, Carnegie, Huntington, Altman”). Their awareness of its widely-reported theft from the Louvre would make them believe they were getting the real thing, and disinclined to report that they had purchased it, the marquis reasoned. Valfierno (“gate of hell”) was the nom de guerre of an Argentinian who acted as front man for a master forger named Yves Chaudron. Together, they made tons of money selling Murillo copies to wealthy widows in Buenos Aires before heading to Europe for bigger game. The forgers managed to unload the Mona Lisa copies for a total of $90 million and intended to return the original to the Louvre with no one the wiser, but one of their simpleton accomplices ran off with it.
Scotti intimates strongly, however, Valfierno and Chaudron (despite turning up in several histories of art forgeries and enjoying their own Wikipedia entries and other Internet references) may have been the pure fabrications of an aging American journalist named Karl Decker. A star reporter for Hearst’s New York Journal, Decker had rescued a beautiful revolutionary damsel in distress from Havana during the Spanish-American War, and was well practiced at embellishing his own journalistic reports.
Decker claimed to have gotten the true story of the Mona Lisa theft from Valfierno himself, in Casablanca, right about the time the painting was recovered … but had sworn to keep the story secret until after the Argentinian mastermind’s death. He broke the story 18 years later, in The Saturday Evening Post.
Whether ultimately concocted by Valfierno or Decker, it makes a rollicking good tale. But it seems a bit disingenuous for Scotti to play out what may in fact be a bald fiction for most of her book – heralding it in the opening pages and then holding off the details until page 191, and finally admitting it may well be a whole-cloth fabrication a dozen pages from the end. We have to assume Chaudron’s six fakes intended to be sold to U.S. tycoons never existed, since Scotti doesn’t even bother to mention whether or not any of them ever turned up.
The book seems a bit slight and still in need of sufficient reason to exist. It boasts a hefty bibliography, but notes are relatively few and index nowhere to be seen. In sum, Vanished Smile seems to occupy a nonfiction subgenre somewhere between Erik Larson (whose bestsellers uneasily yoke an emerging technology to a horrific crime) and Paul Collins (who writes wonderfully peripatetic texts that meander with careless skill around a given topic).
But it’s a little lightweight to stand alongside either type.
August 20th, 2010 at 12:15 pm
Review by booklover for Vanished Smile: The Mysterious Theft of the Mona Lisa (Vintage)
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I started this book unsure of what to expect, but found myself so intrigued that I couldn’t put it down. I knew the history before I started but Scotti wields her words like a paint brush, bring these historical figures to life with such beautiful detail that you feel as though you are there. Each time a chapter comes to an end you think how can the next compare and yet each one is perfectly put together and so satisfying that I am sure I am not the only one to have a hard time putting this book down.
I have been trying to decide which part if my favorite however that is a hard task because I feel that each section so compliments the one before and after that they all just meld into a beautiful, thought provoking story.
This is not just a book for history buffs of art enthusiasts, this is the kind of book that everyone should read, because, as with her previous book Basilica, Scotti deftly weaves history and fact with vivid characters and cheeky whit so that you never feel as though you are reading a history text, instead you are drawn into a wonderful story (the history lesson is an added bonus).
Everyone really should rush out and buy this book, it is well worth it. Enjoy!