Vanished Smile
Authors: R.A. Scotti
ALSO BY R. A. SCOTTI
Basilica: The Splendor and the Scandal
—
Building St. Peter's
Sudden Sea: The Great Hurricane of 1938
Cradle Song
The Hammer's Eye
The Devil's Own
The Kiss of Judas
For Love of Sarah
(as Angelica Scott)
For my mother and first reader
who slipped away from her own museum
August 16, 2007
The only thing that's important is the legend created by the picture, and not whether it continues to exist itself.
—
PABLO PICASSO
MONA LISA
(Courtesy of Erich Lessing/Art Resource, New York)
ACCORDING TO THE SONG
, it's not supposed to rain when it's April in Paris, but the day was wet and raw. I dashed from my hotel room overlooking the Tuileries Gardens, across Rue de Rivoli, and took refuge in the Louvre. There were no ticket lines or tourist groups, and the vastness of the museum swallowed the few visitors, leaving the illusion that I had the whole place to myself. I skipped up the wide front stairs past the
Winged Victory
, imagining myself Audrey Hepburn in
Funny Face
.
The Louvre contains the history of France within its walls—courts, coups, royal weddings, revolution, hangings, and assassination. Henri IV bled to death from the knife of the assassin Ravaillac beneath the frescoed ceiling in the Galerie d'Apollon. The Louvre was a fortress in the Middle Ages, a palace in the monarchy, the people's museum in the Revolution, and Napoleon's showcase in the First Empire. It has stabled horses, sheltered squatters, and served as a printing house, an assignation spot for prostitutes, and studios for artists. David and Fragonard once lived and worked in the area below the Grande Galerie; family wash hung out on clotheslines, heated arguments and cooking flavors filtering up into the galleries. When Napoleon became emperor, he evicted the painters, complaining that one day they would burn down his museum.
I was wandering through the galleries without a guidebook
or floor plan when I came upon Mona Lisa, suddenly, unexpectedly, hanging in the center of one wall. The framed painting was enclosed in a glass box. It was sometime in the late 1970s and there was no special guard or protective rope forcing visitors to keep their distance. On the Louvre wall, she appeared dark, her colors muddy, her attitude aloof. Leonardo wrote that a painter should avoid positioning his subject in the full sun where the light and shadows are strong. She appears different to me now.
I have been living for months with Mona Lisa, teasing out the answer to a century-old mystery. In my narrow room, framed in a single long window, the shutters open to a slant of northern light, she has the colors of the Tuscan countryside. Her complexion is a soft golden shade. It doesn't matter that she has spent nearly her entire life in France or that the French call her
la Joconde
and claim her as a national treasure. Mona Lisa is as essentially Italian as Sophia Loren. Seductive yet serenely contained, instantly recognizable yet ever elusive.
In 2004 and 2005, an international team of specialists assembled at the Louvre to lift Mona Lisa's “veil of mystery.” They analyzed Leonardo's artistry and science using the most sophisticated technology—radiography, 3-D scanners, microfluorescence, infrared reflectography, chemical and gas chromatography of the paint, and more. No work of art has ever undergone such intensive scrutiny.
MonaLisa: Inside the Painting
presents their analyses, confirming in fascinating and exhaustive detail what the astute art patron Cassiano dal Pozzo wrote in 1625: Mona Lisa “lacks only the power of speech.”
Her posture is perfect, her shoulders straight, hands folded one across the other. She wears no jewelry, not even a wedding ring. If she reached a hand out, the gesture would seem perfectly natural. Her face is wide at the cheekbones, the forehead high, the chin pointed. Her nose is narrow, her lips pale and closed, the corners turned up ever so slightly in the famous
smile. More than the smile, though, it is the eyes that captivate. They are warm, brown, and inescapable.
Mona Lisa only has eyes for me. There is no other. No one more interesting, more intelligent, more compelling. And what is extraordinary, if a dozen others crowd into this room, each one will feel the same. Each person who looks at her becomes the only person in her world. It is flattering and, at the same time, maddening, because she gives away nothing of herself.
I close my eyes and imagine that she has vanished.
THE MYSTERY
or MONA LISA that I am pursuing begins in Paris at the end of the Belle Époque, when the city was poised at the cusp of an irreverent new century and an irreverent new art. In the brief
avantguerre
interlude before trench warfare and unutterable loss, a burst of glorious incandescent energy made the City of Lights electric. Extraordinary young talents in many mediums from many nations trooped to Paris to perform their high-wire acts: the Russians Diaghilev and Stravinsky, the Italian Modigliani, the Spaniards Juan Gris and Pablo Picasso, and the man without a country Guillaume Apollinaire.
From the ateliers of Montmartre and the cafés of Montparnasse, a radical creative idiom was emerging that would change both art and writing. While Proust was wresting
The Remembrance of Things Past
from a pile of notes and scribbles, the very sentiment of remembrance was coming under attack. The past was no longer a lesson to be mastered. It was an inhibition to be overcome.
Paris then was as critical to the future of art as Florence was in the Renaissance, and the preeminent painter of each period—the celebrated master Leonardo da Vinci and the
brash young contender Pablo Picasso—became central players in a crime so brazen and so brilliant that it would capture the attention of the world.
A century later, the mystery lingers, the truth as elusive as the prize. Who stole Mona Lisa?
LOUIS BÉROUD PAINTING IN THE SALON CARRÉ
Painter Louis Béroud had been copying Mona Lisa.
When he returned to complete his painting on
Tuesday, August 22, 1911, he made a startling discovery.
(Courtesy of Réunion des Musées Nationaux/Art Resource, New York)
EARLY IN MAY
, with the Hudson glassy beneath a morning haze, an elegant Latin American “marques” stepped off the gangway of the S.S.
Mauritania
. He carried a Louis Vuitton case. The ship had been delayed for an extra day in quarantine at the mouth of the harbor awaiting clearance. At first light, the
Mauritania
was released, and like a dowager queen ignoring the minion tugs hauling and chugging, she began a stately glide up the river to a berth on the west bank of Manhattan island.