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By Root 1076 0

of picture-snapping tourists, it is irritatingly difficult to see. So when you do finally get up close, you’re really expecting something special—what the art critic Kenneth Clark called “the supreme example of perfection,” which causes viewers to “forget all our misgivings in admiration of perfect mastery.”2 Well, as they say, I’m no art critic. But when, on my first visit to the Louvre several years ago, I finally got my chance to bask in the glow of perfect mastery, I couldn’t help wondering about the three other da Vinci paintings I had just walked by in the previous chamber, and to which nobody seemed to be paying the slightest attention. As far as I could tell, the Mona Lisa looked like an amazing accomplishment of artistic talent, but no more so than those other three. In fact, if I hadn’t already known which painting was the famous one, I doubt that I could have picked it out of a lineup. For that matter, if you had put it in with any number of the other great works of art on display at the Louvre, I’m quite positive it wouldn’t have jumped out at me as the obvious contender for most-famous-painting award.

Now, Kenneth Clark might well reply that that’s why he’s the art critic and I’m not—that there are attributes of mastery that are evident only to the trained eye, and that neophytes like me would do better simply to accept what we’re told. OK, fair enough. But if that’s true, you would expect that the same perfection that is obvious to Clark would have been obvious to other art experts throughout history. And yet, as the historian Donald Sassoon relates in his illuminating biography of the Mona Lisa, nothing could be further from the case.3 For centuries, the Mona Lisa was a relatively obscure painting languishing in the private residences of kings—still a masterpiece, to be sure, but only one among many. Even when it was moved to the Louvre, after the French Revolution, it did not attract as much attention as the works of other artists, like Esteban Murillo, Antonio da Correggio, Paolo Veronese, Jean-Baptiste Greuze, and Pierre Paul Prud’hon, names that for the most part are virtually unheard of today outside of art history classes. And admired as he was, up until the 1850s, da Vinci was considered no match for the true greats of painting, like Titian and Rafael, some of whose works were worth almost ten times as much as the Mona Lisa. In fact, it wasn’t until the twentieth century that the Mona Lisa began its meteoric rise to global brand name. And even then it wasn’t the result of art critics suddenly appreciating the genius that had sat among them for so long, nor was it due to the efforts of museum curators, socialites, wealthy patrons, politicians, or kings. Rather, it all began with a burglary.

On August 21, 1911, a disgruntled Louvre employee named Vincenzo Peruggia hid in a broom closet until closing time and then walked out of the museum with the Mona Lisa tucked under his coat. A proud Italian, Peruggia apparently believed that the Mona Lisa ought rightly to be displayed in Italy, not France, and he was determined to repatriate the long-lost treasure personally. Like many art thieves, however, Peruggia discovered that it was much easier to steal a famous work of art than to dispose of it. After hiding it in his apartment for two years, he was arrested while attempting to sell it to the Uffizi Gallery in Florence. But although he failed in his mission, Peruggia succeeded in catapulting the Mona Lisa into a new category of fame. The French public was captivated by the bold theft and electrified by the painting’s unexpected recovery. The Italians, too, were thrilled by the patriotism of their countryman, and treated Peruggia more like a hero than a criminal—before the Mona Lisa was returned to its French owner, it was shown all over Italy.

From that point on, the Mona Lisa never looked back. The painting was to be the object of criminal activity twice more—first, when a vandal threw acid on it, and then when a young Bolivian, Ugo Ungaza Villegas, threw a rock at it. But primarily it became a reference