Why Mona Lisa Smiled
How one art theft shifted our sense of value
This Weekend Edition of Ecstatic features Russ Ramsey
The aftermath of the 1911 theft of Mona Lisa is a fascinating study. No fewer than 120,000 people came to see her during the first two days after her return. To be sure, before she was stolen, Mona Lisa was considered a great work. Sixteenth-century commentator and painter Giorgio Vasari praised her realism, mystery, and romance. But neither he nor any of his contemporaries elevated her to the status she now holds. Before the theft, she lived in a gallery alongside other great paintings by masters like Titian and Raphael, but she wasn’t regarded as the flagship of the fleet in the Salon Carré, much less the Louvre. In fact, Terence McArdle noted, “When The Washington Post first reported the theft and appraised the painting’s value at $5 million, the paper mistakenly ran a picture of the Monna Vanna, a nude charcoal sketch that some believe Leonardo made in preparation to paint the Mona Lisa.”
Mona Lisa didn’t come to be regarded as the pinnacle of the Italian Renaissance until she was stolen and recovered. After her return, she was on the cover of every newspaper around the world. Noah Charney, professor of art history and author of The Thefts of the Mona Lisa, said, “If a different one of Leonardo’s works had been stolen, then that would have been the most famous work in the world—not the Mona Lisa. There was nothing that really distinguished it per se, other than it was a very good work by a very famous artist—that’s until it was stolen. The theft is what really skyrocketed its appeal and made it a household name.”
It was Mona Lisa’s sudden absence, not her four centuries of prior availability, that made her the cultural icon she is today. Her return to public life marked the times when people began giving up vacation days and booking flights to travel halfway around the world just to see her. Art critic Robert Hughes said of the crowds that came to the Louvre, “People came not to look at the painting, but to say that they’d seen it. . . . The painting made the leap from artwork to icon of mass consumption.”
The mania and fame surrounding Mona Lisa became a subject for commentary by pop artists. Was she to be taken seriously as a work of art, or was she just a symbol of pop culture? Was she revered because she was a true masterwork, or was she just famous for being famous? When Mona Lisa toured the United States in 1963, pop artist Andy Warhol joked, “Why don’t they have someone copy it and send the copy, no one would know the difference.” Taking his own suggestion, Warhol created multiple serigraphs of Mona Lisa and arranged them together in what columnist Ben Davis described as a “silkscreen indifferently repeating the famed Leonardo in washed out monochrome gray and black.” Warhol called the piece 30 Are Better Than One.
Today, the eight million people who travel to Paris every year to see Mona Lisa crowd into a gallery built just for her and look at her through a pane of bulletproof glass. She now sits apart, not just from the eager tourists with their iPhones held aloft, but also from the rest of the collection in the Louvre. Part of what makes her so famous is her unattainability—she cannot be owned. But this hasn’t stopped people from dreaming of what it would be like to possess her. Peruggia walked out with her under his arm. He claimed he did it out of patriotism, but with his next breath, he said he would like half a million lira for her return, making his claim of selfless devotion to Mother Italy dubious at best. He wrote of his desire for wealth in a letter to his father two months after he took her: “I will make my fortune and it will arrive in one shot.”
Why would anyone want to possess the Mona Lisa? Why do people steal priceless art? Before the internet, it was much easier to leverage art as currency in the black market, but technology has complicated the crime. If someone stole Mona Lisa today, it would be in every news outlet and social media feed within minutes. Anthony Amore, director of security for the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, said, “Art thievery is a short-sighted crime. Thieves are certain they’re going to make loads of money. Then it hits the press and they realize this is going to get them in trouble.” This is why so many priceless stolen works are slow to resurface, if they resurface at all—thieves realize they’ll likely get caught, whether they try to sell them or return them to claim the reward.
No one can own Mona Lisa. Article 451–55 of the French “Heritage Code” governing national treasures stipulates, “Collections held in museums that belong to public bodies are considered public property and cannot be otherwise.” Still, there is something in us that makes the thought of owning Mona Lisa compelling. The desire to possess the unattainable is a thread that runs through Mona Lisa’s story—from the thief’s desire for money, to his (perhaps feigned) wish for Italy to own the painting that originated there, to the Louvre’s desire to have its stolen works back, to the desire of people around the world to reclaim something they didn’t realize was important to them until it was gone, to the photographs the throngs of tourists take and the refrigerator magnets they buy in the gift shop before they leave the Louvre.
It is this desire for the unattainable that made Mona Lisa the most famous painting in the world. And this is the same compulsion that makes the fifty-year-old man abandon his family for a young trophy wife, motivates the financier to set a goal of becoming a millionaire by the time he turns thirty, or drives the anxious mother to try to preemptively ensure her children will succeed and reflect well on her as they grow up. We want to possess what is not meant to be owned—security, control of the future, unencumbered use of the best the world has to offer. And if we can’t have those, we’ll try to obtain things that give the appearance of them. We think we can prove something about our worth to ourselves or to others when we pull up not in just any car but in a Porsche.
Why do we want what we cannot have? And what does this pursuit cost? Ecclesiastes 5 tells the story of a man who tried to add value to his life by owning what could not be kept. Verses 13–15 read, “There is a grievous evil that I have seen under the sun: riches were kept by their owner to his hurt, and those riches were lost in a bad venture. And he is father of a son, but he has nothing in his hand. As he came from his mother’s womb he shall go again, naked as he came, and shall take nothing for his toil that he may carry away in his hand.”
When the man in Ecclesiastes possessed his wealth, it did him no good. When he lost it, it was unrecoverable. When the next generation needed it, he had nothing to offer. Old Testament scholar Derek Kidner says of the man’s wealth, “Now it has spoilt their lives twice over, first in the getting, then in the losing. . . . [The author] is mainly pointing out what happens, not what ought to happen, in a world we can neither dictate to nor take root in.”
The person who tries to add value to their existence through acquiring things will meet the unavoidable reality that we take from this world the same as what we brought into it—in terms of possessions, nothing. Yet when we encounter objects or desire status that we think can add to our worth, something in us, to borrow a phrase from songwriter Jason Isbell, wants to “try to chase it down, try to make the whole thing mine.” There is something in the human condition that leads us to believe that possessing external things regarded as precious and desired by the world will somehow add to our intrinsic value, even when it costs us dearly. In what ways do we ask of life more than it can give?
Russ Ramsey
Writer & Pastor
Russ grew up in the fields of Indiana. He studied at Taylor University and Covenant Theological Seminary (MDiv, ThM) before becoming a pastor. He and his family live in Franklin, Tennessee. Russ is the author of Rembrandt is in the Wind: Learning to Love Art through the Eyes of Faith (Zondervan, 2022). What did you think of this essay? Share your thoughts with a comment!
I think this speaks to the nature of the human heart quite poignantly. Rather than desire God, we desire what we know is unattainable in this life. We have to always seek after more. Beholding is not enough - do we create pseudo-phenomena to help us feel that we are indeed experiencing something.
An insightful and informative read. Thanks.