The Mona Lisa: Famous for Being Famous

It's Friday, May twenty second. The Louvre just announced it's spending a billion dollars to give the Mona Lisa her own 33,000-square-foot exhibition space. Separate entrance. Separate building. Separate gift shop. The reason: roughly 20,000 people a day line up to see a painting that's 21 inches tall and hangs behind bulletproof glass. The crush has gotten so bad that visitors to the rest of the museum, which holds over 380,000 objects including entire wings of Egyptian, Greek, and Roman antiquities, can barely move through the galleries because of the crowd funneling toward one small portrait. We're covering this today because the obvious question, why the Mona Lisa, has an answer most people don't know. The Mona Lisa is not the most famous painting in the world because it's the best painting in the world. It's the most famous painting in the world because it was stolen in 1911 by a handyman who hid in a closet overnight, walked out with it under his smock, and kept it in a suitcase under his bed for two years. The theft created the fame. Everything since has been the fame feeding on itself. Before August 1911, the Mona Lisa was one of many respected works in the Louvre. It hung on a wall in the Salon Carre (sah-LAWN cah-RAY) alongside several other Renaissance paintings. Art scholars admired it. Leonardo da Vinci was revered. But the painting was not singularly famous. It was not on postcards. It was not a cultural icon. One art historian described it as "a lesser creation by Leonardo da Vinci" relative to his other works. On the evening of Sunday, August 20, 1911, Vincenzo Peruggia (vin-CHEN-zo peh-ROO-jah), a 29-year-old Italian handyman who had previously worked at the Louvre installing protective glass on paintings, walked into the museum and hid inside a storage closet. The museum was closed on Mondays. The next morning, wearing a white smock identical to those worn by museum employees, he walked to the Salon Carre, lifted the painting off the wall, removed it from its glass case in a stairwell, tucked it under his smock, and walked out a side door. The entire theft took roughly twenty minutes. Nobody noticed. Not that day. Not until the following day, when an artist who had come to sketch in the gallery saw the empty wall and mentioned it to a guard. The guard assumed the painting was being photographed on the roof, a routine practice. Hours passed before anyone confirmed the Mona Lisa was gone. The museum shut down for a week. The police launched a massive investigation. They interrogated the poet Guillaume Apollinaire (gee-YOHM ah-po-lee-NAIR), who was jailed for a week. They hauled in Pablo Picasso for questioning. Both were released. Peruggia was interviewed twice during the investigation. He had worked at the Louvre. His fingerprint was on the glass case. The police never made the connection. He kept the painting in a wooden trunk with a false bottom in his one-room apartment on the outskirts of Paris for over two years. "I fell a victim to her smile and feasted my eyes on my treasure every evening," he later said. The empty wall in the Salon Carre became an attraction. People lined up to see the blank space where the painting had hung. Postcards of the empty wall sold out. Newspapers worldwide covered the theft for months. The Mona Lisa appeared on front pages, magazine covers, and newsreels. Millions of people who had never seen the painting, never visited the Louvre, and never thought about Renaissance art now knew what the Mona Lisa looked like. The theft did more for the painting's fame than four centuries of hanging on a wall ever had. Peruggia believed he was a patriot. He thought Napoleon had stolen the painting from Italy (he was wrong; France had legally purchased it centuries earlier). In December 1913, he contacted an art dealer in Florence named Alfredo Geri (al-FRAY-do JEH-ree) and offered to return the painting to Italy for 500,000 lire. Geri contacted the authorities. Peruggia was arrested. He served seven months in prison. Before the Mona Lisa was returned to Paris, it went on display at the Uffizi (oo-FIT-zee) in Florence, where Italians lined up for hours to see it. Then it was exhibited in Rome and Milan. The painting toured Italy as a celebrity before it went home. When the Mona Lisa returned to the Louvre in January 1914, the crowds were enormous. The painting that had been one of many was now the painting. It was placed on its own wall. Security was redesigned around it. Over the following decades, it was reproduced, parodied, and referenced so many times that it transcended art and became a symbol. Marcel Duchamp drew a mustache on a postcard of it in 1919. Andy Warhol silk-screened it in 1963. It appeared on advertisements, album covers, and currency. Each reproduction increased its fame. Each increase in fame generated more reproductions. The loop has been running for over a century. This is the mechanism worth understanding because it applies far beyond the Louvre. The Mona Lisa is the clearest example of a fame feedback loop: an object becomes famous, the fame attracts attention, the attention generates more coverage, the coverage makes the object more famous. The quality of the object matters at the starting point (the Mona Lisa IS a masterpiece by one of history's greatest artists), but after a certain threshold, the fame becomes self-sustaining and detaches from the qualities that justified it. Twenty thousand people a day don't line up because they've studied Leonardo's sfumato (sfoo-MAH-toh) technique. They line up because it's the Mona Lisa, and seeing the Mona Lisa is something you're supposed to do when you're in Paris. The experience of seeing it is often described as disappointing. The painting is smaller than expected. The room is packed. You can barely get close. Most visitors take a selfie and leave within sixty seconds. They came for the fame, not the art. The Louvre's billion-dollar renovation is the logical conclusion of this loop. The museum tried for years to manage the crowd with queue lines, timed entry, and crowd control barriers. None of it worked because the fundamental problem is structural: 20,000 people a day want to see one painting, and they're all funneling through a museum designed for distributed viewing of 380,000 objects. The solution, giving the Mona Lisa her own building with its own entrance, is a concession. It acknowledges that most people who visit the Louvre are coming for one thing. It separates the selfie crowd from the art crowd. Visitors who want to see the Mona Lisa can get in, take their photo, and leave without passing through the rest of the museum. Visitors who want to see everything else can move through the galleries without fighting through the Mona Lisa crush. The museum estimated the redesign will accommodate three million additional visitors per year. The contrarian question is whether this is a victory or a surrender. The Louvre is one of the greatest collections of art in human history. Giving the Mona Lisa its own separate space means accepting that for millions of visitors, the rest of the collection is irrelevant. They're not coming for art. They're coming for a photo with the most famous object in the most famous museum in the most famous city. The Louvre's response isn't to educate those visitors about the other 379,999 objects. It's to process them more efficiently and get them out of the way. But there's another way to read it. The Mona Lisa's fame, however accidental its origins, brings tens of millions of people to a museum they might never otherwise visit. Some percentage of those visitors will wander into another gallery after their selfie. They'll see a Vermeer or a Caravaggio (cah-rah-VAH-joh) or the Winged Victory of Samothrace (SAM-oh-thrayss) and feel something they weren't expecting. The painting that became famous because of a theft might be the reason someone falls in love with art. That's not a bad outcome for a 21-inch portrait that spent two years in a suitcase under a bed in Paris. So if this comes up in conversation, here's how to think about it. The Mona Lisa wasn't the most famous painting in the world until it was stolen in 1911 by a handyman who hid in a closet, walked out with it under his smock, and kept it in a trunk for two years. The empty wall became an attraction. Postcards of the blank space sold out. The theft made international headlines and put the painting on front pages that millions of people saw for the first time. When it was recovered, the fame was permanent. Every reproduction, every parody, every reference fed the loop. The Louvre is now spending a billion dollars to give the painting its own building because 20,000 people a day want to see it and the crush is ruining the experience for everyone else. The Mona Lisa is a masterpiece. It's also the most famous example of something becoming famous for being famous. The theft created the icon. The icon created the crowd. And the crowd just got its own entrance. Have a good weekend. Stay informed, stay curious, and we'll see you Monday.