Today, I am thankful for the knowledge that sometimes we need to lose something before we fully appreciate its worth.
As the old adage notes, we often don’t know what we have until it’s gone. To prove the point, I thought I’d use the entire segment today to share a fitting illustration to prove this principle.
Exactly 109 years ago on this day (Aug 21), a little-known, underappreciated Renaissance masterpiece disappeared. On that early August morning in 1911, three petty criminals walked out of the main entrance of the Louvre Museum in Paris with a blanket securely tucked under their arms. As it was just another manic Monday in Paris, no one paid much attention to what might be hidden under the blanket. As it turns out, the blanket concealed a small wooden canvas of a 400-year old painting originally known as La Gioconda—a 30-inch by 21-inch portrait of a Florentine silk merchant’s wife, Lisa Gherardini del Giocondo. These three Italian handymen had visited the Louvre the day before, dressed in the traditional white smocks worn at that time by all museum employees. After puttering around for a few hours in the Louvre, they slipped into an art-supply closet. After the museum closed its doors to its patrons and all employees scurried home, the trio slipped out of their hiding place and moved over to the Renaissance gallery where La Gioconda was on display. They then lifted the 200 pounds of frame, painting, and protected glass and eventually made their way to the Louvre entrance at around daybreak, with the painting shrouded within a blanket. In a somewhat nonchalant manner, they walked to the Quai d’Orsay station, where they brazenly boarded an express train leaving the French capital. No one bothered to pay them attention. In fact, no one on the Louvre staff was even alarmed the next morning. At that time, paintings were routinely being moved from the gallery to the roof, where they were being photographed for a specific museum project.
A pushy local artist named Louis Beroud, who had traveled to the Louvre to paint the Renaissance gallery where La Gioconda hung among many other renowned works of art, was a bit perturbed that his painting was incomplete. So, Beroud asked the staff to go up to the roof to ascertain when the photographers would be returning La Gioconda to its rightful place on the gallery wall. Well, after what I envision was some bickering and a hearty eye roll, the staff member relented and trudged up the stairs to the roof. A few minutes later, he frantically raced down the stairs informing Beroud and any Louvre staff within earshot that the photographers had no idea where the painting was. La Gioconda had vanished.
The greatest art heist in history was rapidly unfolding. The Louvre closed its doors for a week while an investigation commenced. For nearly two and a half years, over 60 French detectives scoured the city, questioned suspects, and tried desperately to trace the steps of these criminals who dared to steal a Louvre treasure. Everyone was a suspect; in fact, the French poet Guillaume Apollinaire, the renownedartist Pablo Picasso, and the American tycoon J.P. Morgan wereamong the many famous art lovers questioned by these detectives. Unbeknownst to the French police, the real thieves were two brothers, Vincenzo and Michele Lancelotti, and their ring leader Vincenzo Perugia. These three men had stolen the masterpiece with the naïve intent of selling it on the black market. However, the media circus surrounding the crime had made the immediate sale an impossibility, so the painting remained hidden in Perugia’s small Parisian flat for nearly 28 months. In November 2013, after the attention had died down to some extent, Perugia tried to sell the portrait to a Florentine art dealer in his native Italy. Fortunately, the art dealer knew that the painting was a smuggled treasure—one that ironically had been painted in the town of Florence nearly four centuries earlier. The shrewd art dealer convinced Perugia to leave the painting in his possession so he could have it fittingly appraised. Within hours, the police were alerted by the art dealer and Perugia was arrested. After a short stint at the Uffizi Museum in Florence, where thousands swarmed over a few weeks to see the masterpiece, La Gioconda was returned to the Louvre, where it resides to this day behind bullet-proof glass on the first floor in the Denon wing. You can go see it anytime.
Of course, La Gioconda is known to most of us affectionately as the Mona Lisa. Ironically, before its notorious theft, the painting was not well known outside of the art intelligentsia. The heist catapulted this little-known portrait into the global limelight. Prior to making its way to the Louvre in the nineteenth century, the Mona Lisa resided in several inconspicuous corners of the Fontainebleau Palace, the Palace of Versailles, and even Napoleon’s bedroom in Tuileries Palace. In contrast, ten million people now queue up each year to catch a tiny glimpse of this lovely brown-eyed madam with her regal pose and quirky smile.
Sometimes our greatest treasures are not realized. As we learned from our recent quarantines and ‘stay at home’ orders tied to the COVID-19 pandemic, never fail to show your appreciation for what is really precious, like great masterpieces of art or even a roll of toilet paper.
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