Vanished Smile (20 page)

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.

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:

“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:

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:

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.

THE FRENCH HAD DEVOURED
the baron's confession implicating Apollinaire and Picasso. Now Italians were mesmerized by Peruggia's confession. They pictured the young hero-thief far from home, falling under the spell of the timeless beauty he had rescued. As Italy applauded his feat, Peruggia warmed to his story, adding romantic embellishments:

Peruggia stuck to his story under intense interrogation. Insisting that the idea of avenging the Corsican bandit obsessed him, he vowed with a sense of aggrieved honor, “I would be unworthy of Italy if I did not return to her one of these masterpieces.”

The Italian public was in thrall, but the Italian constabulary was not persuaded. Police chief Tarantelli was as skeptical as the French. After questioning Peruggia repeatedly, Tarantelli was convinced that the story was fictitious. Peruggia was playing a role in a script written by an anonymous playwright. It was a brilliant performance but a performance nonetheless.

The man did not match the crime, and even more curiously, his motive did not match the history. While it is true that the first emperor of France was a notorious art thief, Mona Lisa had been seducing the rulers of France long before Napoleon claimed an empire.

WHATEVER THE TRUTH
of the tale, Mona Lisa once again became an international sensation. In Paris, extra editions of the afternoon newspapers trumpeted the find. The illustrated newspaper
Excelsior
put a photograph of the thief on its front
page, encircled with sketches, like panels of a comic strip, showing each step of the theft.

In England,
The Illustrated London News
issued a special supplement with a double-page spread of the painting. For three consecutive weeks, Mona Lisa was the lead story. Even the normally circumspect London
Times
became treacly:

In the United States, the
Los Angeles Times
headlined
MONA LISA IS FOUND: ITALIAN ART FANATIC CONFESSES
and reported, “It is a moot question whether he is an intense patriot, a reckless thief, or insane, perhaps all three.”

On the East Coast,
The New York Times
ran both a breaking-news account and an editorial on the recovery. The article began:

Finding Mona Lisa was a coup for Italy, a relief for the government of France, and a stroke of luck for Alfredo Geri, who collected a reward of twenty-four thousand francs (about
$100,000 today) from
les Amis du Louvre
and received the rosette of the Legion d'Honneur from France.
^∗2

A delegation of experts, led by Paul Leprieur, curator of paintings at the Louvre, was dispatched to Florence. As luck would have it, the month before Mona Lisa was stolen, a photographic firm had taken a series of photographs of the painting, including both back and front views, for the Louvre. They were magnified and brought to Italy. Minister Ricci welcomed the second opinion, if ruefully. “I only wish that the French experts would consider it a copy,” he said, “then Mona Lisa would remain in Italy.”

The Louvre Mona Lisa had several identifying features. One was a vertical crack in the wood panel just to the left of the part in her hair. It probably happened soon after Leonardo finished painting, as the wood expanded and contracted. At some point, to contain the crack, strips of cloth and a pair of butterfly wedges were glued to the back of the panel. When Mona Lisa was recovered in Florence, only one butterfly was in place, but the position of the wedges was clear.

Another defining feature was the
craquelure
. Skeptics might argue that the Louvre labels could be faked, but Leonardo himself could not reproduce with absolute accuracy each minute fissure. Various causes—old age, the effect of varnishes, and the way the original layers of paint were applied—can result in a distinct network of fine cracks on the surface of a painting. After comparing photographs of the Louvre Mona Lisa and the recovered work inch by inch, Curator Leprieur validated the find.