The heist that made the Mona Lisa famous | Hacker News Reader

The heist that made the Mona Lisa famous

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77 pointsthunderbong30 comments

I've always loved this quote: "What audacious criminal, what mystifier, what maniac collector, what insane lover, has committed this abduction?"

Though Peruggia claims he did it out of patriotism, I've always nursed the theory that, during its absence, the original was used as reference to create several extremely good fake versions. These could be sold as the original, since everyone knew it had been stolen, and each would think they had the real one. Then the original is returned, and the buyers are without recourse. What are you going to do, tell the police? And of course Peruggia et al would say nothing.

I suspect this isn't true, but the fun part is that it could be and no one would ever know. So I'm choosing to believe it is so.

I like this approach to epistemology :) Imagine how many what-ifs it could turn up if automated & applied across the corpus of knowledge (scientific & otherwise) :) We'd have Pepe Silvio on steroids, and that I'd like to see =)

The details of the crime seem to point to something like this.

Remember that Picasso was questioned and probably involved. One theory is that what we think is the original is, in fact, a master-copy by Picasso. The original is held privately in Florence.

Unfortunately (for a fun theory), carbon dating and x-rays of the Mona Lisa have disproved that.

There's a reason why you have connoisseurs. You can fool carbon dating by using materials from that time. I'll have to look into the x-rays and what they show, but it can be quite hard to prove art authentic with scientific methods alone.

It'd make a lot more sense to fake the black market copies you actually make money off of.

Unless you wanna keep the original for yourself too

That doesn't seem very smart.

Carbon dating was developed ~30 years after the panting was recovered.

So, the idea someone was going to the effort to use at the time 400 year old material to fool a test nobody knew as even possible, just doesn’t fit.

They wouldn’t be able to do much with an oil painting. Any old drying oil from that time period would have long ago polymerized and carbon isotopes in any new oil used to mix the pigments would be a dead giveaway.

He said the thief returned the original. The copies would have (supposedly) sold to people who wouldn't be able to complain without incriminating themselves.

I was referring to the commenter’s second idea that perhaps the Mona Lisa on display today is a copy. Alas, the truth is less interesting.

Your post reminds me of the very underrated latest film from Orson Well, F for Fake, which is about forgery. It contains an excellent quote from Elmyr de Hory, a notorious art forger, who at some point exclaims: "Guilty? Of what? Making masterpieces?".

I watched it recently, interesting film for sure. In his Cape Era.

> Peruggia, meanwhile, was charged with theft and put on trial in Italy. During his testimony, he claimed that national pride had inspired him to steal the painting, which he believed had been looted from his native Italy during the Napoleonic era. Peruggia was mistaken—Da Vinci had brought the Mona Lisa to France in 1516, and King Francois I had later purchased it legally—but the patriotic defense won him legions of admirers. Even after the prosecution presented evidence that he planned to shop the painting around to art dealers and sell it for profit, many Italians still considered him a national hero.

Just the sort of nationalism that would lead Europe (and other nations) into the Great War only a few years later. The guy only served seven months. Nationalism begets poor outcomes.

OK, this is a horrific tangent, but if you haven't seen the classic Doctor Who story "City of Death", go check it out.

Written by Douglas Adams and filmed on-location in Paris, it involves the Mona Lisa being stolen, and is probably the finest Doctor Who story ever written.

In fact it's so good that I'm always a little disappointed by other classic stories in comparison.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/p00vh9yb/doctor-who-19...

While we're on this tangent, I found Audrey Hepburn's "How To Steal A Million" rather entertaining.

I... I don't see what's special about the Mona Lisa.

daVinci's drawings, on the other hand, teem with life.

It is way over-rated, but it’s still among Leonardo’s best works IMO

Personally I like “Virgin on the Rocks” more

Much better. Also Ginevra di Benchi

Wow I butchered the spelling but too tired to delete &repost

It's a good painting, but with such an unreasonable amount of hype, the real deal can only disappoint. You can't even really engage with it as a painting, it's become some kind of inescapable weird hyper symbol of Great Art (tm).

St John the Baptist gets me far better than Mona Lisa. And as you say, the drawings are kinda where he really shines.

I like to think that for a guy with so many different talents and pursuits, doing all these repetitive, careful passes over what was ultimately commission work to pay his bills was less engaging than the rapid, iterative nature of drawing. Technical and precise, yet ferociously vivid.

Beautifully put. Of course I have to agree.

Why does this notion persist? Water Pater wrote a famous essay on the painting in 1869. My impression is that it made a pretty big splash in the English-speaking world, at least: much later, W.B. Yeats used a sentence from the essay in his Oxford Book of Modern Verse.

This is the subject of a fun little ditty on Vulfpeck’s upcoming live album:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=T7ahw2jhpdE

It's funny that most of people think the Mona Lisa is a masterpiece when in truth there is nothing particularly interesting about this painting. Just the heist that made it famous

Really? This is why the Mona Lisa is famous? Not because of any intrinsic properties of the painting itself?

Archive link for non-US users: https://web.archive.org/web/20241109154132/https://www.histo...

The original worked fine from NZ, so there must be some tighter criterion.

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