August The theft of Mona Lisa is discovered. September 6: Paris-Journal prints the story that it has received the other two stolen statues. Apollinaire implicates Pablo Picasso. Picasso is brought in for questioning and released. September: Following a report to the French Cabinet, Homolle is forced to resign as museum director. Spring: The still-missing painting is honored in a traditional mid-Lent parade in Paris with a float showing Mona Lisa taking off in an airplane for points unknown.
Autumn: Florentine antique dealer, Alfredo Geri, prepares an exhibition and places an advertisement in several Italian newspapers stating that he is "a buyer at good prices of art objects of every sort.
November Geri receives a letter with a Paris postmark in response to his ad, from a man calling himself "Leonardo Vincenzo," who says he has the Mona Lisa in his possession and wishes to restore the painting to Italy.
December Vincenzo Perugia a. Perugia opens a trunk and removes the Mona Lisa , which had been hidden under a false bottom. However, what impressed me most were their spirit and personalities. Natalia, a ballerina-turned-actress, is more extroverted and bubbly; her younger sister Irina, more reserved. But both exude such graciousness, warmth, and charm that I had to wonder — although we can never know — Mona Lisa might have shared their ebullience.
I know: I saw it when I presented him with a copy of my book on his renowned ancestress. Is there a new book on the way? I see it as a jubilant combination of history, travel reporting, memoir, and love letter to Italy — a culture, rather than a mere country, that has transformed art and architecture, language and music, food and fashion. This is fascinating and when next I am in Florence I want to do this walking tour. Thank you so much for sharing this story.
This was so interesting about the Mona Lisa. She was a beautiful woman. Thank you for sharing your research I learned so much!
I was captivated by this amazing story, Lisa Gherardini, the real Mona Lisa. She was a very beautiful woman. Thank you for your research and writing this story. I have been called the Mona Lisa half my life because people said that I looked like the painting and have been stopped at airports and museums to have my picture taken. It was a nuisance when I was younger, but then got curious on why this picture was so famous. The passage that Yeats couldn't help co-opting begins: "She is older than the rocks among which she sits; like the vampire, she has been dead many times, and learned the secrets of the grave; and has been a diver in deep seas, and keeps their fallen day about her; and trafficked for strange webs with Eastern merchants, and, as Leda, was the mother of Helen of Troy, and, as Saint Anne, the mother of Mary; and all this has been to her but as the sound of lyres and flutes.
Some viewers are as transfixed by Mona Lisa's hands as by her face Credit: Alamy. Pater's description still astounds. Unlike Dumesnil and the doomed Maspero before him, Pater sees past the seductive snare of the portrait's smile to a larger vitality that percolates as if from deep below the surface.
Contending that the painting depicts a figure suspended in ceaseless shuttle between the here-and-now and some otherworldly realm that lies beyond, Pater pinpoints the mystical essence of the panel's perennial appeal: its surreal sense of eternal flux. Like Vasari, Pater bears witness to a breathing and pulsing presence — "changing lineaments" — that transcends the inert materiality of the portrait's making. Key to the force of Pater's language is an insistence on aquatic imagery that reinforces the fluidity of the sitter's elusive self "faint light under the sea", "a diver in deep seas", and "trafficked… with Eastern merchants" , as if Mona Lisa were an ever-flowing fountain of living water — an interminable ripple in the endless eddies of time.
Perhaps she is. There is reason to think that such a reading, which sees the sitter as a shape-shifting spring of eternal resurgence, is precisely what Leonardo intended. Flanked on either side by bodies of flowing water that the artist has ingeniously positioned in such a way as to suggest that they are aspects of his sitter's very being, Da Vinci's subject has a strangely submarine quality to her that is accentuated by the algae green dress she wears — an amphibious second skin that has only grown murkier and darker with time.
Pivoting her stare slightly to her left to meet ours, Mona Lisa is poised upon not just any old bench or stool, but a deep-seated perch known popularly as a pozzetto chair.
Meaning "little well", the pozzetto introduces a subtle symbolism into the narrative that is as revealing as it is unexpected. By placing Mona Lisa on a 'little well', surrounded by water, Da Vinci could be drawing on earlier spiritual connections with springs Credit: Alamy. Suddenly, the waters we see meandering with a mazy motion behind Mona Lisa whether belonging to an actual landscape, such as the valley of the Italian River Arno, as some historians believe, or entirely imaginary, as others contend are no longer distant and disconnected from the sitter, but are an essential resource that sustain her existence.
They literally flow into her. By situating Mona Lisa inside a "little well", Da Vinci transforms her into an ever-fluctuating dimension of the physical universe she occupies. Art historian and leading Da Vinci expert Martin Kemp has likewise detected a fundamental connection between Mona Lisa's depiction and the geology of the world she inhabits. She is the landscape. As with all visual symbols employed by Leonardo, the pozzetto chair is multivalent and serves more than merely to link Mona Lisa with the artist's well-known fascination with the hydrological forces that shape the Earth.
The subtle insinuation of a "little well" in the painting as the very channel through which Mona Lisa emerges into consciousness repositions the painting entirely in cultural discourse.
No longer is this a straightforwardly secular portrait but something spiritually more complex.
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