Word: thefts
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What we know is this: In the early morning hours of a Monday morning, before the Louvre was opened for visitors, Mona Lisa was stolen by a thief who acted quickly when no guards were around. The theft didn't even come to light until the next day. (Guards who noticed that the painting was missing assumed it had been removed to be photographed.) Once museum officials realized the truth, the Louvre was shut down. Police arrived to question the staff, re-enact the crime and dust for fingerprints, a new crime-fighting technique in those days. The French border...
Though there's evidence that Peruggia tried repeatedly to sell the picture, he always insisted that his only motive in stealing Mona Lisa was to return it in glory to Italy and to exact revenge for Napoleon's massive theft of artworks all across Europe. One problem: Mona Lisa had never been part of the Napoleonic plunder. Though Leonardo had begun the painting in Florence in 1503, he took it with him to France 13 years later when he resettled at the court of the French king François I. After his death there in 1519, the painting passed...
...pile of baloney. In 1932 a swashbuckling American journalist named Karl Decker published a piece in the Saturday Evening Post, in which he wrote that in 1914 in Morocco, he met an aristocratic con man, Marqués Eduardo de Valfierno, who told him that he had masterminded the theft as part of a scheme to sell six meticulously forged versions of Mona Lisa to six gullible millionaires. Each would be duped into believing he had secretly bought the picture that had just been famously stolen from the Louvre. But in order to carry out the scam, it was necessary...
...Vanity Fair this month, it was the Decker story that occupied most of the excerpt, with the Hooblers' shrugging disclaimer tacked at the end. No matter, within days a blog on the Boston Herald website was reporting that the Hoobler's book "reveals" that de Valfierno commissioned the theft...
Scotti is right about one thing. The huge publicity surrounding the theft helped to launch Leonardo's great painting into the stratosphere of fame. "Mona Lisa left the Louvre a work of art," Scotti writes. "She returned an icon." Truer to say she returned a pop-culture celebrity, the kind who's helpless to stop the world from spreading loose talk about her. That's a temptation neither of these books was able to resist...