Vanished Smile (26 page)

For Decker, the
Saturday Evening Post
article might have been a chance to make headlines again and reinvigorate a waning career. He wrote it in the old sensational style that he had mastered in his youth and that can be embarrassing to read today: “For twenty-one years, the story of the world's single greatest theft has been kept’ under the smother.’ Until now there has been not even a hint of the tangled and intricate plot….”

A case can be made that, with his glory days behind him, Karl Decker played fast and loose with the truth, lifting elements of his story directly from various Paris newspapers and weaving them into a more memorable, more satisfying scenario than Peruggia's confession. The Marques de Valfierno's description of how the heist was carried out corresponds to the report made by Magistrate Henri Drioux and contradicts Peruggia's sworn testimony. The notion of a sting was suggested in the days immediately following the theft by Joseph Reinach of
les Amis du Louvre
and published in
Le Temps
.

If Decker spiced the story, he left a few clues. One is the forger's name.
Chaudron
means a large kettle or cauldron, something the French might use to prepare a cassoulet. Decker's
Saturday Evening Post
article seems to be a
chaudron
in which he has mixed bits of evidence and conjecture, laced with generous pinches of invention, imagination, and wry humor. There is also a street in Paris, Rue Chaudron, located just a couple of blocks from the apartment where Mona Lisa remained hidden for two years.

In perhaps another entertaining flourish, the forger allegedly honed his craft by faking the works of Bartolome Murillo, whose favorite subject was the Immaculate Conception. Decker's
article was an immaculate conception of sorts. He provides no supporting material. Nothing in the article suggests that he ever interviewed Peruggia, and there is no evidence that the convicted thief knew of the article.

When Decker's expose ran in the
Saturday Evening Post
, the
Los Angeles Times
called it “the most plausible explanation yet given of the strange theft from the Louvre of the Mona Lisa.” The article went on, “Whether this story is authentic or the product of a lively imagination (not, of course, the author's but he may have been imposed upon) would be difficult to check without a great deal more data than are given in the
Post
account, but it is a fine, romantic tale, which ought to be true if it isn't.”

Karl Decker's trail is as cold as everything else about the case. He died intestate in New York City in 1941 and was cremated. He left no family or heirs except his wife, Maude, who was then living alone and in failing health in a small walk-up apartment without a telephone on West Seventy-fifth Street.

In the mid-1940s, the novelist James M. Cain wanted to write a movie based on the
Post
article. He spent several years trying to track down information on Decker to acquire the rights, but he came up empty-handed. None of the magazines that had published Decker could help him, and his efforts to contact Maude Decker were unsuccessful.

Whether fact or fiction, the Marques Eduardo de Valfierno was buried with Karl Decker. Only his alter ego lives on. Although he may have been nothing more than the kettle in which a reporter brewed a fanciful tale, today every list of history's legendary forgers includes the name Yves Chaudron.

MONA LISA'S CALLING CARD
When Mona Lisa returned to the Louvre in January 1914, the museum printed this calling card, saying that Mona Lisa would once again be receiving visitors every day except Monday. (Courtesy of Roger-Viollet/Getty Images)

BEFORE AUGUST
21, 1911, Mona Lisa belonged to the realm of high art. After August 21, she became a staple of consumer culture. The pure beauty that Frangois I made his own, that Leonardo clung to and Raphael copied, that Louis XIV and Napoleon took into their bedrooms became fair game for advertisers, authors, pop stars, and promoters.

Mona Lisa was spoofed for the first time in 1887, when she was pictured smoking a pipe. Since then many artists have parodied her or paid her homage, including Dali, Léger, Marisol, Rauschenberg, and Peter Max. Duchamp painted a beard and mustache on a cheap postcard reproduction of Mona Lisa and added the inscription
LHOOQ
(Elle a chaud au cut
, She has a hot ass). Andy Warhol silk-screened multiple Mona Lisa images, giving her the media status of Marilyn Monroe and Jackie O.

Nat King Cole, Bob Dylan, Elton John, Willie Nelson, even Britney Spears and hip-hop singer Slick Rick have sung about her. She has been fodder for science fiction and suspense writers from Ray Bradbury to Dan Brown,
Star Trek
to
Doctor Who
. Julia Roberts starred in
Mona Lisa Smile
. Looney Tunes made her a cartoon in
Louvre Come Back to Me
, and the Simpsons reduced her to a homophone, “Moanin' Lisa.”

As the first mass masterpiece, she is a commodity like the Campbell Soup can. Insert a celebrity face over hers, and an instant ad or magazine cover is created. Jackie Kennedy,
Golda Meir, Monica Lewinsky, Joseph Stalin, and Salvador Dali have all been Mona Lisa-ed.

Yet her mystery persists. Sigmund Freud went off on a flight of psychoanalytic fancy to understand and interpret her. He theorized: “Leonardo was fascinated by the smile of Mona Lisa because it had awakened something in him which had slumbered in his soul for a long time, in all probability an old memory.” He suggested that Leonardo's “mother possessed that mysterious smile which he lost and which fascinated him so much when he found it again in the Florentine lady.”

Others have read her smile as an expression of sweet perfidy, androgynous beauty, and desperate hope. It has been called “a deceitful mask,” “a veiled threat,” and the smirk of “a woman who has just dined off her husband.”
^∗1

Although the truth could be as simple as aesthetic necessity—given the quality of dental hygiene in the 1500s, full smiles were far from comely—comparisons are made to “the strange smile of benign comprehension” that the Buddha wears, the “archaic smile” that animated ancient Grecian sculpture, and the Renaissance smile of Donatello's
David
.

In recent years, a pair of researchers in Holland studied Mona Lisa's smile using an emotion-recognition software program. The face-tracking technology read Mona Lisa's expression as 83 percent happy, 9 percent disgusted, 6 percent fearful, 2 percent angry, and less than 1 percent neutral. No wonder she is inscrutable.

Neurologists have analyzed her smile as the response of cranial nerve VII, which controls the facial muscles. According to studies made by a professor at Harvard University, Mona Lisa's smile appears and disappears depending on whether we
gaze at her peripherally or directly, which may explain why she seems to catch us looking at her.

The more that is said about her, the less seems certain. Every fresh study provokes more conjecture. One theory reduces her to a mathematical equation. The golden ratio and the significance of pi in Leonardo's work are the subject of earnest articles. Another theory alleges that Mona Lisa is a symbol of the Egyptian goddess Isis and encrypted in her image is the ancient secret of the Giza Pyramids. A computer scientist, juxtaposing Mona Lisa with Leonardo's self-portrait, surmises that she is the artist in drag.

There are even more exotic interpretations. Squinting at Mona Lisa reveals an infinity of hidden faces behind the famous mask, one devotee claims. Squint some more and a human skull metamorphoses behind her left shoulder. Cover the left side of your face and she appears confident; cover the right side and she seems reticent. Gaze at her by candlelight while blinking rapidly and her smile changes, her face assumes different expressions. A Japanese forensics expert believes that by analyzing Mona Lisa's skeletal structure, he can accurately re-create her voice, which, he says, has a low register for a woman.

ON DECEMBER
14, 1962, forty-nine years to the day after she began her Italian tour, Mona Lisa went on the road again. Curators were afraid to let her leave the Louvre a second time, but General Charles de Gaulle was the president of France and André Malraux was his minister of culture. They were a formidable pair, both masters at generating publicity.

With a $100-million insurance policy (approximately $608 million today), Mona Lisa sailed for the United States on the S.S.
France
. A police escort brought her to Le Havre, where the ship's captain was waiting on deck to welcome her. She had her own first-class cabin, with security guards in the cabin on one side and nervous Louvre curators and conservators in the cabin on the other. Outfitted in a custom-made 352-pound airtight, floatable, temperature-and-humidity-controlled container, constructed of steel alloy and padded with Styrofoam, she was the safest passenger on board the luxury liner.

When she arrived in New York, the director of the National Gallery, John Walker, was waiting at the dock with a Secret Service contingent. They transported her to Washington in a modified ambulance padded with foam rubber. All traffic was blocked from entering the Holland and Baltimore Harbor tunnels when she rode through. Because any change from the conditions that Mona Lisa was accustomed to might damage her irrevocably, Walker modified the air-conditioning system in the National Gallery so that “the atmosphere of her temporary home simulated the very air she had breathed in Paris.”
^∗2

Mona Lisa had come a long way from her days in Vincenzo Peruggia's closet. Her American visit occurred at a low point in U.S.-French relations. Against American wishes, de Gaulle was going outside of NATO to arm France. Nevertheless, President Kennedy welcomed the illustrious visitor with the honors usually reserved for a head of state. The guest list for her white-tie reception included the Supreme Court justices, the governor of every state, both houses of Congress, and the full diplomatic corps.

When the National Gallery opened to the public, the line of visitors stretched down the Mall. Director Walker estimated that she was seen by more people “than had ever attended a
football game, a prize fight, or a World Series. … Her visit caused an esthetic explosion in the minds of many of those who saw her…. This great painting started some impulse toward beauty in human beings who had never felt that impulse before.” After her Washington performance, Mona Lisa moved to the Metropolitan Museum in New York for another sold-out month-long engagement.

In 1974 she went on the road again. Mona Lisa flew for the first time, from Paris to Tokyo. To avoid any change in pressure during the flights, her aluminum travel case was fitted in a protective steel container. So many Japanese wanted to see her that each person was limited to a ten-second glimpse. Mona Lisa even had her own phone. Anyone in Japan could dial a special number, and she would answer, “Hi, my name is Lisa and I am known as the
Gioconda.”
From Tokyo, she went on to Moscow, where she was lionized again.

MONA LISA DOESN'T
get around much anymore. France now has a law forbidding her from leaving the country. But six million people visit the Louvre each year, and it is safe to bet that just about every one of them stops in to see her. She has moved from her old spot in the Salon Carré to her own personal room in the Louvre, constructed at a price tag of $6.2 million and paid for by a Japanese television company. It is a virtual bunker.

Mona Lisa is set in concrete behind two sheets of bulletproof triple-laminated, nonreflective glass, separated by nine and a half inches (twenty-five centimeters). Her own personal
bodyguards protect her from a repeat of 1911. In her new home, climatic conditions are constantly monitored. Ultrasound equipment and silica gel inside the display case keep her comfortable at all times, maintaining her temperature at a constant 55 degrees Fahrenheit with 50 percent humidity. The space between the sheets of glass creates a thermal buffer that prevents the fluctuating temperature of the room from affecting the temperature inside the case.