{"id":52337,"date":"2017-07-10T09:45:09","date_gmt":"2017-07-10T16:45:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.todayifoundout.com\/?p=52337"},"modified":"2017-07-10T09:45:09","modified_gmt":"2017-07-10T16:45:09","slug":"mona-lisa-caper","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.todayifoundout.com\/index.php\/2017\/07\/mona-lisa-caper\/","title":{"rendered":"The Mona Lisa Caper"},"content":{"rendered":"
The following is an article from Uncle John\u2019s Bathroom Reader<\/a><\/em><\/div>\n

\"Mona_Lisa_stolen-1911\"<\/a>August 21, 1911. Louis Beroud, a painter, busily set up his easel in the Salon Carr\u00e9, one of the Louvre\u2019s more than 200 rooms, directly facing the spot where the Mona Lisa usually smiled out at her admirers. Beroud had painted copies of La Gioconda plenty of times before. But this time he planned to set up his own model next to the painting and paint the two together, with his model using the Mona Lisa\u2019s protective glass case as a mirror. Beroud was looking back and forth between his equipment and the glass case, when suddenly he froze. There was an empty space where the Mona Lisa should have been.<\/p>\n

When he asked a guard where the painting was, he was told that it was in the photography room, where copies were made. Beroud waited three hours for the painting\u2019s return, but eventually, his patience gave out. He asked the guard to go and see what was taking so long. When the guard returned after a few minutes, he had to admit to Beroud that the painting was nowhere to be found.<\/p>\n

A DISPOSAL PROBLEM<\/strong><\/p>\n

What would an art thief do with the painting? At the time, it was worth about $5 million (4 million euros). But to whom would the thief sell it? Even if a buyer were willing to spend that much, the painting was too high profile to be passed along the art-theft network. It would be too easily traced, which meant that the perpetrators would be too easily caught.<\/p>\n

Theories abounded in France; some thought it was an elaborate practical joke, while others thought it was a political ploy by the Germans to humiliate the French. Some accounts of the theft say that local Paris artists\u2014Pablo Picasso, among them\u2014were brought in for questioning. The city could not believe that such a treasure was gone forever.<\/p>\n

OVERNIGHT SENSATION<\/strong><\/p>\n

In truth, the Louvre housed many treasures. But the theft transformed this particular one from valuable painting to icon. The Mona Lisa was now a cottage industry: Posters, postcards, mugs, pamphlets, nightclubs, silent movies, and magazine and newspaper articles featured her image. If T-shirts had been the fashion, her face would have graced every one of them. And behaviorists find it especially peculiar that after the theft, record crowds swarmed into the Louvre to gaze at the empty space where the Mona Lisa had once hung. Most of these visitors had never even seen the original. Why did people go to a museum to see a work of art that wasn\u2019t there?<\/p>\n

TURNING THE PLACE UPSIDE DOWN<\/strong><\/p>\n

It took a week for the museum to be searched completely. All that turned up was the painting\u2019s empty gilt frame, found at the top of a staircase that the thief must have used as his escape route. The 38 \u00d7 21-inch (97 \u00d7 53-cm) wood panel that the Mona Lisa had been painted on was gone. Months passed, then years, and still no sign of her.<\/p>\n

A LETTER FROM LEONARD<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"Monalisa_uffizi_1913\"<\/a>November 29, 1913. A wealthy Italian art dealer, Alfredo Geri, received a letter from a Leonard Vincenzo. In the letter, Leonard offered to return the Mona Lisa to Italy, her home country\u2014for a fee. Geri thought Leonard might be a crackpot, but he was intrigued enough to set up a meeting in Florence. There, in a hotel room, Leonard, a short, dark-haired, mustachioed Italian who\u2019d been living and working in Paris at the time of the theft, reached under the bed and retrieved an object wrapped in red silk. He uncovered it and showed it to Geri and Giovanni Poggi, the director of Florence\u2019s Uffizi Gallery. Poggi verified its authenticity: it was the Mona Lisa.<\/p>\n

ARREST THAT MAN!<\/strong><\/p>\n

While the painting hung temporarily in the Uffizi before being returned to Paris, Leonard was picked up by the police. His real name, he said, was Vincenzo Peruggia. He described the caper to the police. He\u2019d entered the Louvre the morning of the theft dressed in a painter\u2019s white smock and had gone straight for the girl of his dreams. No one else was in the Salon Carr\u00e9 that morning, so Peruggia simply removed the painting from the four wall hooks and concealed it, frame and all, under his smock. When he got to the staircase, he removed the painting from its frame, tucked the Mona Lisa back under his smock, and walked out. The whole thing took about 20 minutes.<\/p>\n

THE PATRIOT?<\/strong><\/p>\n

In court, Peruggia said he\u2019d stolen the painting for purely patriotic reasons: because she belonged in Italy\u2014she had, after all, been painted by Leonardo da Vinci\u2014and because he wanted to take vengeance on Napol\u00e9on for his various Italian conquests.<\/p>\n

But during the trial, prosecutors brought up Peruggia\u2019s criminal past. He had a prior record: an arrest in France for attempted robbery and illegal possession of firearms. What\u2019s more, Peruggia\u2019s diary was filled with the names of art dealers and collectors in the United States and Italy: names like J. P. Morgan, Andrew Carnegie\u2026and Alfredo Geri, the art dealer who had helped bring him to justice.<\/p>\n

ALL ROADS LEAD TO PARIS<\/strong><\/p>\n

Peruggia was sentenced to one year and 15 days; he served seven months. He eventually moved back to Paris and opened a hardware store.When he died in 1927, he still presented himself as one of Italy\u2019s greatest patriots.<\/p>\n

The Mona Lisa has been safely back at the Louvre since her recovery. Today, she smiles out\u2014from her nearly impregnable, climate-controlled, bulletproof glass case\u2014at more than five million admirers a year.<\/p>\n

\n

\"\"<\/a>This article is reprinted with permission from Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader Plunges Into History (Again)<\/a><\/em>. In it, Uncle John goes back in time to bring fans more compelling, confounding, and fascinating peeks into the world’s past. International in scope, you’ll read about historical events, people, and places worldwide. As always, the slant will be on revealing what they didn’t teach you in history class–history unexpunged!<\/p>\n

Since 1987, the Bathroom Readers\u2019 Institute<\/a> has led the movement to stand up for those who sit down and read in the bathroom (and everywhere else for that matter). With more than 15 million books in print, the Uncle John\u2019s Bathroom Reader series is the longest-running, most popular series of its kind in the world.<\/p>\n

If you like Today I Found Out<\/a>, I guarantee you’ll love the Bathroom Reader Institute’s books, so check them out<\/a>!<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The following is an article from Uncle John\u2019s Bathroom Reader August 21, 1911. Louis Beroud, a painter, busily set up his easel in the Salon Carr\u00e9, one of the Louvre\u2019s more than 200 rooms, directly facing the spot where the Mona Lisa usually smiled out at her admirers. Beroud had painted copies of La Gioconda plenty of times before. But […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":179,"featured_media":52338,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-52337","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-today-i-found-out","category-history"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.todayifoundout.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/52337","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.todayifoundout.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.todayifoundout.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.todayifoundout.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/179"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.todayifoundout.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=52337"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.todayifoundout.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/52337\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":52340,"href":"http:\/\/www.todayifoundout.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/52337\/revisions\/52340"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.todayifoundout.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/52338"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.todayifoundout.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=52337"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.todayifoundout.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=52337"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.todayifoundout.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=52337"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}