Transcript of Episode 1:

For the Love of Mona LisaPUBLISHED FEBRUARY 10, 2018

[Ambient/electronic style theme song plays, then fades out as narration

begins]

When you think of an art museum, how does it look in your mind? Does it
look like a beautiful temple, standing serene amidst a bustling city? Does it
look like a dusty old palace of mysteries and strange pictures? Does it,
perhaps, look like the most boring place you could ever possibly visit?
Whether you visit museums all the time or would never be caught dead in
one, this podcast is for you.

My name is Allyson Healey, and I’m part of the first group—I’m that weirdo
who could sit in front of a painting for an hour, just looking. If I had the
money, I’d buy every big coffee table book in every museum gift shop and
every luxury accessory with a print of a famous painting on it. I’m an art nerd.
I’ve spent my whole life entranced by the creative things human beings can
produce. I even got a Master’s degree in it, I love it so much. But art doesn’t
speak to everyone in the same way it speaks to me. To a lot of people, art
can seem obscure and impenetrable, luxurious and excessive, even totally
unnecessary, and in some ways, they’re right (even though as an art nerd I
hate to admit it). For so many people, art never even enters into their
consciousness, or when it does, it does so in very limited, snobby, and
boring ways. This podcast is about broadening the audience for art, and
making the conversation around that art more relevant to more people. It’s
not so much about asking what a given artwork signifies or “means” in and of
itself, but rather about asking what it means in the context of society over
time. What aspects of art do we consider important or valuable, whether
culturally or monetarily? Why do some artworks and artists become famous,
and others remain relatively unknown? To put it another way: what’s the big
deal about all this stuff?

For this first episode, I wanted to start from the most familiar place I could.
Pretty much everybody knows Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa, even if they
haven’t seen it in real life. The thing is everywhere—t-shirts, tote bags, desk
toys, music, TV…if there’s a surface, someone has probably tried to stick a
picture of the Mona Lisa on it. But how much do people know about the
painting itself? How did it come to be so adored worldwide? What relevance
does it have to us, now, in the twenty-first century?

[An excerpt of the theme song reprises, fading in, then out again]
A Description of the Mona Lisa:

A woman is depicted facing forward, with her body turned slightly to her
right. She sits in front of a hazy landscape made up of mountains, winding
roads and rivers, and a lake or sea. She wears a transparent veil over her
hair, which is parted in the middle and hangs down on either side of her face
in rippling brunette curls. Her dress is dark and fairly simple, with minimal
embellishment, though her sleeves have a gold tone. Her dark eyes look
directly at the viewer from under a smooth, pale, eyebrow-free forehead, and
her nose is straight and slightly pointed at the end. Her mouth curves gently
in a slight smile. Her arms are folded and her hands rest on the arm of the
low-backed chair in which she sits. The entire painting as it currently
appears is largely composed of earthy tones, with blues for the sea and
atmospheric effects on the more faraway mountains, and reddish tones
suffusing the soil alongside the winding roads in the background.

[An excerpt of the theme song reprises, fading in, then out again]

Leonardo da Vinci began painting the portrait that would be known as Mona
Lisa or La Gioconda in the early 1500s, upon his return to Florence from
Milan. Florence was where he had grown up and where his family had
connections—he came from a long line of legal professionals, and it’s likely
that he was commissioned to paint the Mona Lisa as a result of his family’s
connections with silk merchant Francesco del Giocondo and his wife, Lisa
Gherardini. Francesco had married Lisa, his second wife, in 1495, when she
was 15 and he was about 30.[1] At the time that Francesco commissioned
Lisa’s portrait from Leonardo, he was doing quite well financially, but
Leonardo scholars Martin Kemp and Giuseppe Pallanti state that despite
Francesco’s wealth and increasing social prominence, Lisa’s portrait wasn’t
at the top of Leonardo’s list of priorities.[2] Portraits were popular
commissions, but they weren’t necessarily the most lucrative or intellectually
challenging projects, especially if you were Leonardo and people were
regularly asking you to do things like redirect rivers and build armored war
vehicles. Thus, despite working on it for about four years, Leonardo never
actually delivered the finished painting to Francesco and Lisa. Instead, he
took it with him when King Francis I of France—perhaps the least inventively
named French king—recruited him in the 1510s to design a palace for him
and be a general asset to his court.[3] Francis I greatly admired the portrait of
Lisa Gherardini, and that admiration spread even amongst those who had
likely never seen it, such as early art historian Giorgio Vasari.

Vasari is a huge figure in the history of art, but is less than reliable when it
comes to actual historical facts. His most important work, The Lives of the
Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects, does a lot of
mythologizing when it comes to the lives it describes. Some of the artists
and works that Vasari covers are ones he did know or would have heard of,
but there’s also a lot of hearsay sprinkled throughout, and more than a little
fiction. “But Allyson, why are you even talking about this dude if he’s so
unreliable?” I hear you cry. Well, dear listener, Vasari is valuable because
for hundreds of years people DID think he was reliable, and DID use him as
their primary source of knowledge about Renaissance figures and works. He
fundamentally shaped historical thought for centuries. So despite that
dubious accuracy, the stories that Vasari told people are pretty crucial to
understanding how people looked at Renaissance art after the Renaissance
ended.

Vasari spends a good chunk of his biography of Leonardo discussing the

Mona Lisa commission. Here’s an excerpt from the Oxford University Press
translation of Vasari’s text:

[Lute music underscores the following narration. Song: “Suonatore di Liuto,”

Kevin MacLeod, incompetech.com.]

“For Francesco del Giocondo, Leonardo undertook the portrait of Mona Lisa,
his wife, and after working on it for four years, he left the work unfinished,
and it may be found at Fontainebleau today in the possession of King
Francis. Anyone wishing to see the degree to which art can imitate Nature
can easily understand this from the head, for here Leonardo reproduced all
the details that can be painted with subtlety. The eyes have the lustre and
moisture always seen in living people, while around them are the lashes and
all the reddish tones which cannot be produced without the greatest care.”
Vasari continues later, “…to tell the truth, it can be said that portrait was
painted in a way that would cause every brave artist to tremble and fear,
whoever he might be. Since Mona Lisa was very beautiful, Leonardo
employed this technique: while he was painting her portrait, he had
musicians who played or sang and clowns who would always make her
merry in order to drive away her melancholy, which painting often brings to
portraits. And in this portrait by Leonardo, there is a smile so pleasing that it
seems more divine than human, and it was considered a wondrous thing
that it was as lively as the smile of the living original.”[4]**

[Lute music fades out]

It wasn’t long after Leonardo’s death, then, that people began to wax
rhapsodic about the Mona Lisa, bringing in ideas of both otherworldliness
and intense realism, and latching on to Lisa’s smile as the most remarkable
thing about the painting. Whether Leonardo actually did hire entertainers to
help generate Lisa’s smile is unclear, but Vasari’s inclusion of this detail
frames the image not as a bog-standard Italian Renaissance portrait but as a
different kind of artistic endeavor altogether, something for which the
creation of natural expression was apparently paramount. The nature of that
expression is what confuses most people—if Leonardo did indeed hire
entertainers, then judging by Lisa’s smile they must not have been very
good, because considered in that context her smile looks sort of tepid and
polite. It’s just the kind of smile one would have if the guy they hired to just
paint them like all their friends had been painted suddenly decided to get
all conceptual on them and hired the local circus to try and force a smile.
Kemp & Pallanti note that the smile could also just be read as a pun on
Lisa’s married name—Giocondo, in the feminine form, becomes Gioconda,
or the “jocund lady.”[5] The relationship between the smile and the subject’s
name has become muddled over the many hundreds of years through the
work’s title in multiple languages: when the Italians refer to La Gioconda or
the French refer to La Joconde, it’s clear that they are specifically referring to
this one image of this one woman, not just any woman of the del Giocondo
family.

After Leonardo’s death some gaps in the painting’s history, or provenance,

began to appear, which Kemp and Pallanti are quick to note “have been
seized on as spaces for unsubstantiated speculation,” and effectively put
that sort of foolishness to bed by matter-of-factly setting out the timeline of
the painting: the Mona Lisa remained with Leonardo until his 1519 death, at
which point his pupil Salaì inherited it, and then after Salaì’s death in 1524
Francis I acquired it and it remained in France thereafter.[6]

The French royal art collections were redistributed between various

residences over the years, eventually ending up at Versailles, and were then
transferred from there to the Louvre after the French Revolution in 1797,
creating the foundation for the first modern art museum. Soon after that
move, when Napoleon assumed power, the Mona Lisa was one of the works
he chose to adorn his own residence, specifically his bedroom, at the
Tuileries Palace.[7] He returned it to the Louvre when he became Emperor in
1804, and it’s still there today, albeit not in precisely the same imperial
circumstances.

For a brief period of time, however, the Mona Lisa was conspicuously absent
from the Louvre altogether—in August 1911, it was stolen right off the gallery
wall and was not returned until 1913. Oddly enough, nobody really noticed
the theft for nearly two whole days—according to a chapter from Dorothy
and Thomas Hoobler’s 2009 book The Crimes of Paris, republished in Vanity
Fair, the Louvre’s photographers often moved objects from the galleries to
their studio to photograph them without notifying curators or maintenance
staff. This was assumed to be the case with the Mona Lisa[8], which is kind
of mind-blowing to anyone who’s been to a museum lately, given that they
have guards absolutely EVERYWHERE and they’re pretty quick to jump on
you if you so much as breathe too close to something. The day after the
theft, when the galleries reopened and an insistent art student demanded to
know where the work he planned to copy had gone, everyone suddenly
realized what had actually happened, and the media had a field day.
Countless people were suspected, including Pablo Picasso, who had been
in a bit of trouble a few years earlier for buying some Iberian sculptures that
had been stolen from the Louvre by the secretary of a prominent art critic.
Some conspiracy theorists of the period even suspected banker and
professional rich person J.P. Morgan for the theft, due to his particularly
greedy and predatory style of art collecting.[9]

The Louvre left the space where the Mona Lisa had hung empty for about a
year after the theft, and it garnered as much, if not more, attention than the
actual artwork. It became a memorial site of sorts, and people even left
flowers under the blank space—the absence of the picture was just as
powerful as its presence.[10] Eventually the space was filled by a
reproduction of the Mona Lisa, and in December 1912[11] the reproduction
was replaced by Raphael’s portrait of Italian courtier Baldassare Castiglione.
An entirely different artist, an entirely different subject, erasing even the
memory of the Mona Lisa having hung in its place.

It was almost a year after the replacement of Mona Lisa with Baldassare, in
November 1913, that the thief began to emerge from hiding. An Italian art
and antiquities dealer named Alfredo Geri received an anonymous letter
from a person who claimed to have the Mona Lisa. Mistakenly believing that
the painting had been looted by Napoleon, the thief claimed that he stole the
painting in order to restore an Italian national treasure, and said he “would
not refuse compensation” if a reward were possible.[12] After a number of
cancelled meetings, Geri, along with Giovanni Poggi, the director of the Uffizi
Gallery, met the thief in Florence in December 1913. He escorted them to
his room in the Hotel Tripoli-Italia, where he removed the false bottom from a
trunk full of junk and pulled out the Mona Lisa. Poggi quickly determined it to
be the real thing, even down to the Louvre catalogue number on the back of
the wood panels. After persuading the thief to let them take it back to the
Uffizi for further tests, and then persuading him to let them keep it there until
they could get further instructions from the government, as well as the large
reward promised, Geri and Poggi finally had the painting secured. Almost as
soon as the thief returned to his hotel after the final meeting with Geri and
Poggi, police knocked on his room’s door to arrest him for the theft.

The thief’s name turned out to be Vincenzo Perruggia, and he had actually
briefly worked at the Louvre, even building the case that housed the Mona
Lisa while it was there.[13] And how had he masterminded this incredible
crime? He put on a smock, walked into the Louvre, took it off the wall, then
walked into a side stairwell, took the painting out of its frame and case, then
hid it under his smock and left.

Well, he also had to remove a door handle so he could actually get OUT of
the stairwell, but other than that, the whole enterprise was surprisingly
simple for the theft of such a major artwork from a major museum. Perruggia
was sentenced to one year and 15 days in prison for the theft, which was
later reduced to seven months after a successful appeal. This turned out to
have been just about the amount of time he’d been held since his arrest, so
he was released. Ah, the justice system!
Over time, inconsistencies in Perruggia’s story and questions about whether
he acted alone have been contemplated repeatedly. But I think the way the
theft was carried out is far less important to us now than the fact that the
painting was stolen at all. Given the centuries-long fascination with the Mona
Lisa as some kind of mystical, romantic object, it’s almost surprising that
nobody seems to have tried to steal it before 1911. Kemp and Pallanti’s
account of the theft suggests that Perruggia had an “emotional involvement”
with the painting—not so hard to believe, given the way art critics and
historians have written about it throughout history.[14] Perruggia’s theft didn’t
necessarily make the painting into a “legend” or a “masterpiece,” as we’ve
seen that it was fairly legendary even before then. But it catapulted the work
beyond the art historical sphere and into the popular consciousness.

[An excerpt of the theme song reprises, fading in, then out]

A 2006 BBC article claims that six million people view the Mona Lisa per
year.[15] That’s nearly twice the population of Los Angeles. Six million people
per year shuffle into a gallery and slowly push themselves forward until they
are stopped by a rope barrier, which sits about three feet in front of a
wooden barrier, which in turn is set a short distance away from the
bulletproof glass that contains the carefully climate-controlled painting. The
painting itself is only 30 inches by 21 inches, not very big at all. Between the
sheer distance from the painting, the glare on the bulletproof glass, and the
small size of the painting itself, not to mention the hundreds of other tourists
with their smartphone cameras and DSLRs aimed directly at it, the Mona
Lisa is perhaps shrouded in mystery now mainly because it’s so difficult to
properly see it. It’s also positively dwarfed by the painting that hangs
opposite it, Paolo Veronese’s The Wedding Feast at Cana, which measures
a little over 22 by 32 feet. The setting in which the Mona Lisa hangs is not, in
and of itself, something that really shows the painting off to its best
advantage. Part of all this is, of course, practical—the Louvre, like many
European museums, was not purpose-built to be a museum space, so
there’s not exactly a ton of room available to give the Mona Lisa its own
dedicated, hallowed chamber. The Mona Lisa has also been vandalized
multiple times, from someone throwing acid on it in 1956, to someone
throwing a rock at it the very same year, to a disablity rights activist spraying
it with paint in 1974, to a woman throwing a mug at the bulletproof glass in
2009. That, combined with the fact that Perruggia essentially just walked off
with it in 1911, is more than enough justification for keeping the painting as
far away from potential harm as possible. But it does make the viewing of
the painting intensely frustrating for many visitors, making the pilgrimage to
see the most famous image in the world less of a pleasure and more of a
chore.

Despite this, or perhaps because of it, the image of the Mona Lisa is
reproduced on all kinds of objects and is mythologized in all kinds of media.
One of the most notable manipulations is a 1919 work by the artist Marcel
Duchamp, a member of an anarchic movement called Dada that confronted
the chaotic post-WWI world with equally chaotic images, poetry, and
performances. Duchamp took a print of the Mona Lisa, drew a small
mustache and goatee on Lisa’s face, and wrote underneath the image the
letters L.H.O.O.Q. In English, these letters mean nothing. But when said in
French, Duchamp’s native language, the letters sound very similar to the
phrase “Elle a chaud au cul,” meaning “she’s got a hot ass.” Once you
realize the pun, the image takes on a kind of graffiti-like quality—it’s
blasphemous, it’s insulting, it’s even a bit destructive in a way. It plays into
the disrespectful, nonsensical spirit of what Duchamp and his fellow
Dadaists were trying to do, but it also reinforces the Mona Lisa’s legendary
status. By judging the Mona Lisa to be worthy of
vandalism, L.H.O.O.Q. acknowledges the sacred status of the original
painting. It acknowledges the numerous personifications of the painting by
making a vulgar pun that refers to a “she”—by the logic of most language,
the only “she” that it could refer to is Mona Lisa herself. The insult is general
in that it’s not explicitly directed at any real individual, but it’s also specific
and personal in that it’s placed in relation to the image of a single person.
And not just any person, but a person whose image has been essentially
revered for hundreds of years.

But where Duchamp’s image is more of an artistic statement, reproductions

of and references to the Mona Lisa are perhaps best known in their more
commercial forms. Nat King Cole’s namesake love song, for example, is a
midcentury pop classic that trains its focus on the portrait’s mysterious smile
and blurs the line between the woman being sung to and the painting being
referenced. The conflation of woman and image, and the perception of Mona
Lisa’s smile as seductive, is a recurring theme in a lot of commentaries on
the painting, like this one by art critic Théophile Gautier from 1857:

[Mysterious, ambient-style music with tambourine underscores the following

narration. Song: “Lasting Hope,” Kevin MacLeod, incompetech.com]

“…the expression, wise, deep, velvety, full of promise, attracts you

irresistibly and intoxicates you, while the sinuous, serpentine mouth, turned
up at the corners, under violet-tinged shadows, mocks you with such
sweetness and grace and superiority, that you feel wholly timid like a
schoolboy before a duchess…repressed desires, despairing hopes well up
painfully in the shadow shot with sunbeams, and you discover that your
melancholy arises from the fact that la Jocconde, three hundred years ago,
greeted your avowal of love with the same mocking smile which she retains
even today on her lips.”[16]**

[Mysterious music fades out]

Gautier is definitely on the more intense end of the Mona Lisa admiration
spectrum, but he’s a good example of how many people tend to talk about
the Mona Lisa not as a work of art, but as a living woman, more often than
not a living woman who is trying to seduce the viewer. In the popular
imagination, the only thing better than a mystery is a sexy mystery, and it’s
passages like this one that further amplify the unanswered questions
surrounding the painting by applying a sensual interpretation to the work’s
central mystery—Mona Lisa’s smile.

The mysteries of the Mona Lisa, whether genuine or applied to the painting
by overactive imaginations, took on a more conspiratorial bent with the
publication of Dan Brown’s novel The Da Vinci Code in 2003. The original
cover prominently featured the Mona Lisa’s eyes, despite the fact that
the Mona Lisa itself is not the most important work in the story. But the Mona
Lisa is already associated with mysteries and unanswered questions, so
what better Leonardo work to use to exemplify that mysteriousness?
Between the mythologizing about Mona Lisa’s smile and the tin-hatting
about Leonardo’s connections to the Knights Templar, it seems pop culture,
and culture more generally, has taken every possible opportunity to not only
investigate real questions surrounding the Mona Lisa, but also to entirely
manufacture new mysteries, as if the existing ones aren’t juicy enough. And
for a non-art historian, let’s be honest, they probably aren’t juicy enough. It’s
hard to find the glamour in digging around dusty old Tuscan archives looking
for five-hundred-year-old receipts.

So what’s the value, then, of creating all this mystery and hype? It certainly
increases the monetary value of the original work of art—the Mona Lisa was
valued for insurance purposes at $100 million in 1962, which works out to
about $800 million today.[17] It also makes the Louvre a more desirable place
to visit, and in turn, makes Mona Lisa souvenirs at the Louvre gift shop more
desirable to buy. It also makes any other object associated with the Mona
Lisa more desirable—take for instance Louis Vuitton’s recent collaboration
with contemporary artist Jeff Koons, a collection of handbags and tech cases
featuring reproductions of famous paintings emblazoned with the names of
their respective artists. Judging by this collection, it would seem that the
Mona Lisa is legendary enough to justify pricing a wallet at 1770 American
dollars, to say nothing of the $4000 duffel bag.[18]

So the Mona Lisa is a huge cash cow for its home institution and for
companies looking to capitalize on its cachet. But what about for us, for
ordinary human beings who aren’t looking to make a buck or write a song or
craft a web of conspiracy theories around it? What value does this Most
Famous Image have for people in general? Well, as has been proven time
and time again, and continues to be proven through the popularity of the
genre, people love a mystery. They love being given a problem to solve or
an answer to seek out, even if the answer has already been found or the
problem is one that never really existed in the first place. And despite there
now being a decent amount of documentation to answer some of the older
questions surrounding the Mona Lisa, there are some things that we will
probably never get an answer to, short of learning Italian and hopping in a
time machine to go and ask Leonardo and Lisa what the hell the smile was
all about. The immediate mysteries of the painting are further compounded
by the legend of its creator’s quirky genius—his mirrored writing, his
prophetic invention of flying machines and tanks, his breaking of taboos
against human dissection in order to study anatomy. All of this is further
jumbled up by the spread of urban legends, misinformation, and conspiracy
theories, and what the general public ends up seeing is more often than not
a mysterious grab bag of myths, facts, fables, and queries. As frustrating as
it can sometimes be to see misinformation spread, especially about
significant aspects of human history and achievement, in this case I think we
can look at the mysteries and myths surrounding the Mona Lisa as valuable
in and of themselves. They’re a testament of sorts to our ability to take a
small wood panel painting and build it up into a pillar of Western culture, to
craft a legend out of basically anything. The Mona Lisa as an object matters
not just because it’s a beautiful portrait by a masterful artist, but also
because it has stimulated so many imaginations to question its origins, to
invent stories about its history, to make it emblematic of Paris, or Florence,
or of the concept of femininity; or, indeed, to transform it into a signifier for
art in general. Ask anyone to name three famous paintings and it’s very
likely that the Mona Lisa will be one of them, if not the very first on the list.
For so many people, it’s the quintessential Great Painting—but whether it is
the Greatest is still up for debate. And honestly, that’s as it should be.
The Mona Lisa has held the top spot among paintings in the popular
imagination for a very long time, but with hundreds upon thousands of
artistic productions having been and still being produced right now all across
the planet, can we really truly say it’s retained that distinction? It’s a question
to keep in mind as we continue to explore art in this podcast—how it’s
viewed, how it in turn reflects back on those viewing it, and how it fits into the
incredibly diverse world in which we live.

[Theme music fades in and underscores the following narration]

Thanks so much for listening to Art History for All. You can find a transcript
of this podcast, with links to images and complete citations and sourcing, at
arthistoryforall.com. You can also check us out on Twitter at @arthistory4all,
or tag us with #AH4A (that’s A, H, number 4, A). This podcast was produced,
narrated, and edited by me, Allyson Healey. The theme was composed by
Bruce Healey. Snacks and other life-giving sustenance necessary for the
production of this podcast were provided by Patricia Healey. Credits for
other background and interstitial music can be found in the podcast
description. Make sure to subscribe to the podcast feed so you won’t miss
future episodes, and remember to look closely: you never know what you
might see.

[Theme music fades out]

Endnotes:

[1]
Martin Kemp and Giuseppe Pallanti, Mona Lisa: The People and the
Painting (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), 27.

[2]
Kemp & Pallanti, 43.

[3]
Kemp & Pallanti, 105.

[4]
Giorgio Vasari, The Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and
Architects (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), page 294.

[5]
Kemp & Pallanti, 167.

[6]
Kemp & Pallanti, 103.

[7]
Kemp & Pallanti, 123.

[8]
Dorothy Hoobler and Thomas Hoobler, “Stealing Mona Lisa,” Vanity Fair,
May 2009, https://www.vanityfair.com/culture/2009/05/mona-lisa-
excerpt200905.

[9]
Hoobler & Hoobler.

[10]
Hoobler & Hoobler.

[11]
Hoobler & Hoobler.

[12]
Hoobler & Hoobler.

[13]
Hoobler & Hoobler.

[14]
Kemp & Pallanti, 132.

[15]
“Faces of the Week,” BBC News, September 29,
2006, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/5392000.stm.

[16]
Quoted in Kemp & Pallanti, 128.

[17]
“Highest insurance valuation for a painting,” Guinness World
Records, http://www.guinnessworldrecords.com/world-records/highest-
insurance-valuation-for-a-painting
[18]
“Da Vinci in Masters LV x Koons,” Louis
Vuitton, http://us.louisvuitton.com/eng-us/women/masters-lv-x-koons/da-
vinci/_/N-1hklpukZ1328xji

Background music:

“Lasting Hope”, “Suonatore di Liuto”

Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)

Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

Art History for All © 2018 Allyson Healey

Theme music © 2018 Bruce Healey