'Mona Lisa Smiles Only On The French'
('Grand Paris' local press, 26 April 2024)
Fourth & final essay on la vie mouvementée of the painting known to the world as Mona Lisa. First, second and third installments are free here on Riffs. The bulk of this somewhat lengthy dig is behind a paywall, as a reward for those who forked over 30€ for a yearly, the lowest rate Substack allows. Why not join the crowd before all the tables are taken ? Thanks to all readers, commenters, even the critic in back.
What is it about this painting ? Mere notoriety, a fixation in the public mind ? Rather a homely lady, the portrait of a decent bourgeois from Florence set against an extraordinary background. Well-known if finally mysterious expression, not giving anything away. And yet, when she isn’t getting soup thrown at her by lost boys and girls from good families who believe they’re doing something for the ‘environment’, an organization out of nowhere makes the claim of plundering by the French, astonishing only because they didn’t bother with evidence.
Thursday this week saw the latest attempt to pry Mona out of the cold, cold hands of the proprietors of the French estate. Restitutions International presented their case, without legal representation, to the French Conseil d’Etat, said august body presumably going to mull the issue for months before delivering a thundering No Chance. No lawyer on the case speaks volumes and no one knows who Restitutions International is or to whom they are demanding the Mona Lisa be restored. No squad of well-dressed lawyers, no web site, no presence on ubiquitous social media, so we must conclude it’s the Usual Suspects from NGO world, unless it’s the Mafia or a front for hungry collectionneurs tired of paying inept burglars. They didn’t say who the painting really belonged to. They’ve been to the Conseil d’Etat before on behalf of gems from Peking’s Summer Palace, with unhappy results but if at first you don’t succeed, as the saying goes.
A small historical known about La Joconde is that the Florentine family who commissioned the work never paid for it, leading the painter, while still fit and able, to carry out a midnight, highly privileged ‘restitution’ with the help of a small entourage. He kept the portrait safely in his hands to the end of his life, during trips up and down the Italian peninsula and finally, as an old man, out of the country. Another tale worth closer inspection.
So why is the painting the Italians call La Gioconda in France in the first place ? Like Peruggia who slipped out a side door of the Louvre with the canvas under his coat in 1911, many persist in believing it’s one of Bonaparte’s thefts, a not exactly baseless idea given the Corsican’s rapacious looting of art from the peninsula, the full count being over a thousand paintings and sculptures. Still, that’s not it, heists during wartime, but a far more involving, humane tale, for which we need to do a bit of time travel to the city of Bologna in Italy’s Emilia-Romagna in December, 1515.