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St. John the Baptist and Virgin and Child with St. Anne. The smile, Freud wrote, “has produced the most powerful and confusing effect on whoever looks at it.” 52 He felt that it held special meaning for the artist, because he used it several times, and surmised that when he first encountered it on the face of Lisa, the model for Mona Lisa, “it awoke something in him which had for long lain dormant in his mind — probably an old memory.” It was, Freud concluded, “the smile of bliss and rapture which had once played on his mother’s lips as she fondled him.” 53 The recurring dream Leonardo described was of the tail of a bird striking his mouth over and over. That image, Freud suggested, may well have been caused by the memory of his mother kissing him.

Freud thought that Leonardo was a homosexual, though the only proof for this is that the artist never married and was once accused in court of practicing sodomy, a charge he was cleared of. Couching his argument in genteel terms, Freud said that at the time Leonardo encountered his mother’s smile on the face of the real-life Mona Lisa, he

had for long been under the dominance of an inhibition which forbade him ever again to desire such caresses from the lips of women. But he had become a painter, and therefore he strove to reproduce the smile with his brush, giving it to all his pictures.… The figures [in the pictures, including Leda, John the Baptist, and Bacchus, as well as Mona Lisa]… gaze in mysterious triumph, as if they knew of a great achievement of happiness, about which silence must be kept. The familiar smile of fascination leads one to guess that it is a secret of love. It is possible that in these figures Leonardo has denied the unhappiness of his erotic life 54 and has triumphed over it in his art, by representing the wishes of the boy, infatuated with his mother, as fulfilled in this blissful union of the male and female natures. 55

Perhaps following Freud’s lead, others began to speculate that love must hold the secret behind the theft. Just as Napoleon had hung the painting in his bedroom, so perhaps now someone had felt such desire for the portrait that he had stolen it. Indeed, Leonardo himself had told the story of such a man, who conceived a carnal love for one of the artist’s other works: “Such is the power of a painting over a man’s mind that he may be enchanted and enraptured by a painting that does not represent any living woman,” Leonardo wrote. “It previously happened to me that I made a picture representing a holy subject, which was bought by someone who loved it and who wished to remove the attributes of divinity in order that he might kiss it without guilt. But finally his conscience overcame his sighs and lust, and he was forced to banish it from his house.” 56

Contributing to the speculation along these lines was the fact that shortly before the theft, the Louvre had received a postcard addressed to the Mona Lisa. It was a “red-hot love declaration, peppered with ‘I love you’s’ and ‘I adore you’s.’” 57 It raised the possibility that the theft had been the work of an erotomaniac, someone obsessed enough with the subject of the painting that he might steal it. The employees of the Louvre now recalled that a young man, blond with blue eyes, would come almost every day to stand enraptured in front of the Mona Lisa as if he could not drag himself away. Clearly, this person should be high on the list of suspects. But no one knew his name.

The editor of Le Temps found this idea appealing enough to ask Dr. Georges Dumas, professor of experimental psychology at the Sorbonne, to write about the psychology of the thief. Dumas eagerly responded to the suggestion. “As to the mentality of such a thief,” he wrote, “one will find it described in medical works, where such lunatics are called fetishists, who tremble in the presence of beauty and become obsessed by it, often showing much ingenuity and energy in obtaining symbols of such beauty. Such a person would have carried Mona Lisa to his rooms trembling with joy, gloating over the possession like a miser,