The Daily Lesson

Leonardo da Vinci was a man of many talents.  He envisioned a lot of crazy stuff which he sketched out in his famous notebooks.  Stuff like the parachute, a tank, a diving suit, and a helicopter along with other flying machines.  What Leo is best known for are his paintings. 

There are only about 20 known da Vinci paintings.  On just about any list, Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa is the most famous painting of all time.  Coming in second is The Last Supper (1495-1498), also by da Vinci, who was probably told by his freshman Art teacher that he didn’t have any artistic talent.  The Mona Lisa is actually a portrait of an Italian noblewoman named Lisa Gherardini.  “Mona” is a shortened form of “Madonna,” which means “my lady.”  And, of course, her first name was Lisa – My Lady Lisa.  Her husband commissioned da Vinci to paint her portrait in 1503, but da Vinci never delivered the portrait, because he never completed it, probably because of extreme perfectionism and an injury to his hand.  It was still hanging in his studio when he died on May 2, 1519, at the age of 67.

Leonardo da Vinci’s paintings don’t come on the market very often.  But when they do sell...  Wow!  Take the Salvator Mundi, which depicts Christ giving a benediction.  For the longest time, mostly because it wasn’t in very good shape, folks didn’t believe it to be an authentic da Vinci.  At best, they thought it might have been one of his student’s.  Still, it sold for $10,000 in 2009.  By 2017, they’d cleaned it up, verified that it was an honest to God da Vinci, and it sold for 405.3 million dollars – the all-time record for a painting. 

So you know if the Mona Lisa were ever to go up for auction... you can’t afford it.  Of course, you could always steal it, which is what happened on August 21, 1911, when a guy named Pietro Vincenzo Antonio Peruggia stole it from the Louvre in Paris.  Peruggia had briefly worked at the Louvre, cleaning and reframing paintings, as well as building the security cases around such paintings as the Mona Lisa, so he knew how to quickly get inside it.

As the story goes, Peruggia entered the Louvre on the evening of August 21 and hid out in a storage closest.  After closing, he took the painting off the wall, removed it from its case, and then draped his smock over it.  A janitor, thinking he worked there, let him out a service door.  And then he took the painting back to his apartment were he hid it in a trunk.  Police searched for the painting in vain, interviewing anybody who had even the slightest connection with the museum, including Peruggia.  They even went to his apartment – twice – but left.  Peruggia had left a fingerprint, and they had his fingerprints on record, but they still didn’t put it together. 

And the painting remained missing.  After being hidden in a trunk in Paris for over two years, Peruggia took it to Florence, Italy, where he was arrested on December 12, 1913, while trying to sell it to an art dealer. 

Peruggia claimed that he had stolen the Mona Lisa so he could return it to its homeland, Italy, which went over well with an Italian court.  As well, it didn’t take long for people to realize that Peruggia wasn’t a criminal mastermind in the least.  He was just a guy with below average intelligence who got lucky.  In the end, Peruggia only served 7 months of a one year and 15 day sentence.  Peruggia, after serving in WWI, as well as working in other museums, died in 1925.  There have been several movies, songs, and what-not based on Peruggia’s theft.

Perhaps the biggest impact Peruggia had was on the public’s perception of the Mona Lisa.  Sure, everybody knew the painting was good before Peruggia stole it, but, at best, it was one of da Vinci’s lesser known paintings.  By stealing it, Peruggia brought international attention, and turned that lesser known painting into the priceless cultural icon that it remains today.

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