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    Vanished Smile: The Mysterious Theft of Mona Lisa
    Unavailable
    Vanished Smile: The Mysterious Theft of Mona Lisa
    Unavailable
    Vanished Smile: The Mysterious Theft of Mona Lisa
    Audiobook6 hours

    Vanished Smile: The Mysterious Theft of Mona Lisa

    Written by R.A. Scotti

    Narrated by Kathe Mazur

    3.5/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this audiobook

    On August 21, 1911, the unfathomable happened-Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa vanished from the Louvre. More than twenty-four hours passed before museum officials realized she was gone. The prime suspects were as shocking as the crime: Pablo Picasso and Guillaume Apollinaire, young provocateurs of a new art. As French detectives using the latest methods of criminology, including fingerprinting, tried to trace the thieves, a burgeoning international media hyped news of the heist.

    No story captured the imagination of the world quite like this one. Thousands flocked to the Louvre to see the empty space where the painting had hung. They mourned as if Mona Lisa were a lost loved one, left flowers and notes, and set new attendance records. For more than two years, Mona Lisa's absence haunted the art world, provoking the question: Was she lost forever? A century later, questions still linger.

    Part love story, part mystery, Vanished Smile reopens the case of the most audacious and perplexing art theft ever committed. R. A. Scotti's riveting, ingeniously realized account is itself a masterly portrait of a world in transition. Combining her skills as a historian and a novelist, Scotti turns the tantalizing clues into a story of the painting's transformation into the most familiar and lasting icon of all time.


    From the Compact Disc edition.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPenguin Random House Audio
    Release dateApr 7, 2009
    ISBN9780739381816
    Unavailable
    Vanished Smile: The Mysterious Theft of Mona Lisa

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    Reviews for Vanished Smile

    3.5/5

    104 ratings17 reviews

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    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 4/5
      Amazing look at what should be a bit of history that we all know about. I listened to this title and the appreciated the beauty of the French names and places more than I would have expected. Great background and interweaving of European political and cultural history in the early 20th century.
    • 2/5
      I'd never heard of this early 1900's theft of Mona Lisa from the Louvre, so looked forward to the details of the investigation and some of the facts around the heist. I was doomed to disappointment, surprised that the story was so highly speculative, providing next to no factual basis for the author's conjecture about the theft. I never did grasp the point of Scotti's story because it read like poorly-plotted novel with gushy comments about the allure of the lady in the painting, irrelevant side stories involving other artists, unverified con men (Valiferno) and irrelevant general French history. These distracting insertions into the brief factual aspects of the theft digressed from the theme and hardly contributes to what could have been an interesting piece of art-theft history.
    • 4/5
      In the summer of 1911, the Mona Lisa was stolen from the Louvre and the mystery went unsolved for two years before (one of) the culprit(s) confessed. To some, it was considered the greatest art heist of all time, and others are convinced that we still don't know all the facts of the crime nor all the players. This book chronicles the history of the event, along with background information on the painting itself, its painter, and the possible people in on the crime.I love micro histories, and this one didn't disappoint. I'm not much up on art history, so I didn't even know the heist had happened, let alone that Picasso was hip deep in the controversy. A very cool incident very nicely explained.
    • 5/5
      After listening to this book, I will need to go back to the Louvre to view Mona Lisa - I didn't see her before, since there was so much else to see. Such an interesting chain of events, with people I would never have thought connected (Picasso), and during a time period that I read other books. Great for a road trip.
    • 5/5
      Very interesting. I never knew.
    • 3/5
      I like the story with the history especially about events that I did not know about (the theft of the Mona Lisa in 1911) would be a 3 1/2 if they had that rating somewhat dry in parts.
    • 3/5
      Well. I don't know. I'm interested in forgeries and plagiarism and how cultural things attain perceived value - art, music, and so on. One of my co-workers lent me Vanished Smile in exchanged for me loaning her Forged: How Fakes Are the Great Art of Our Age, after I mentioned my interest (and we work in an art museum). I was intrigued to read about the theft of the Mona Lisa in 1911, as I only vaguely knew about it and was interested in learning about museum security 100 years ago and so on.Vanished Smile delivers on that, but also discusses the state of journalism in 1911, and how detectiving was done. But Scotti writes a digressive book that flutters back and forth between topics and doesn't really talk about the theft itself until the last third. Instead, he builds up to it, I think trying to create the effect of a police investigation or something.But it didn't really work for me. While I did learn about Picasso and Apollinaire, and even some new things about Leonardo de Vinci, in addition to journalism, museum security, &c., I really wanted to know about the theft itself, and it was frustrating at points that Scotti kept talking about other things instead.Furthermore, Scotti uses a fairly, well, romantic mode of writing. He includes quite a bit of speculative matter, too, without being entirely clear what was fact and what he was filling in. And I just wanted to know the details of the case. I didn't want rhapsodies about the painting or about how people fall in love with it, or speculation about de Vinci's motives - though, again, I can kind of see how it makes sense if Scotti was trying to present the story similarly to an investigation, with facts and history and conjecture intermingling until the truth comes out.It's not a bad book, but I think my personal preference is for something more matter-of-fact and organized differently. I may have even liked this one more if it weren't for the constant claims of the Mona Lisa's power of enchantment - maybe it's because I'm a child of the 1980s and she has been a constant of pop culture for me my entire life, but I've never understood the appeal. And the thing about the smile - it's the same as so many other Renaissance portraits, so why is it special here? (I believe her direct gaze is more interesting, and the background, thanks to my art history courses.) That Scotti continually referenced the smile as being so mysterious and enchanting and causing men to fall in love with her grated and made me disinclined to feel generous towards the rest of the book, I'm sure.
    • 3/5
      A decent overview of the 1911 theft of the Mona Lisa from the Louvre, intermingled with a look back at the painting's biography and the lives of those associated with it. Scotti discusses how Picasso and Guillaume Apollinaire got caught up in the case, and evaluates a 1937 Saturday Evening Post story which supposedly revealed the long-hidden mastermind behind the theft (but did it?).While Scotti's prose tends toward the flowery at times, perhaps prompting an eye-roll or two, overall this was an enjoyable read.
    • 4/5
      The August, 1911 theft of the Mona Lisa from Paris's Louvre is one of history's most famous art thefts. Despite the involvement of top criminologists such as Alphonse Bertillon, French authorities were unable to locate the missing painting. The few available clues were either contradictory or led to dead ends. Early suspicion centered on artist Pablo Picasso and his close friend, writer Guillaume Apollinaire. At one point, Apollinaire was arrested for the crime, but after a short stay in jail, he was released for lack of evidence. Several years after the trail went completely cold, the painting resurfaced in Italy. Scotti details how the theft was carried out and the thief's motivation for the crime. (I was surprised by the similarities to the museum theft in the movie How to Steal a Million.) However, some experts question whether the thief acted alone or had accomplices who were never identified.I listened to the audio version of the book (coincidentally, almost exactly 100 years after the theft). The book's biggest flaw is its structure. Scotti breaks up the discovery and investigation of the Mona Lisa's disappearance and its eventual reappearance and explanation of the theft with a long digression on Leonardo da Vinci's life, the identity and life of the painting's subject, and the early history of the painting. It seemed like padding to stretch the material to book length, and it disrupted the flow of the narrative. If you're reading the book rather than listening to the audio, I think you could skip that section without feeling like you're missing something.
    • 4/5
      On August 21, 1911, a 400-year-old matron absconded from Paris’s art trove, the Louvre. Born within relative obscurity, she had been transported across various state lines. Often belittled within Florence’s Medici confines, certainly a visitor in the bathroom of France’s François I and later celebrated in Louis XIV’s bedroom, she became a near-forgotten hostage, chained on the museum’s wall for nearly one hundred years before being liberated.R.A. Scotti breathes life into a century-old mystery surrounding the theft of Leonardo da Vinci’s celebrated painting of Lisa Gherardini del Giocondo, La Gioconda, or as commonly called, Mona Lisa. Scotti’s breezy style paints a lively discussion of a theft that aroused worldwide furor, exposed the ineffectiveness of museum security and international policing, and prompted bewildering—and as yet unresolved—theories as to the nature of the crime.Initially, lack of museum security was blamed, which called for the head of its director. Flummoxed due to lack of any obvious clues to the heist, French authorities initially lassoed la band de Picasso, a group of cultural anarchists led by Pablo Picasso and Guillaume Apollinaire. But that resulted in the two being found guilty of harboring the theft of several Louvre antique statues lifted by a kleptomaniac group-member. In 1913, the Louvre’s Italian glazier, Vincenzo Peruggia, approached a Florentine art dealer to sell the painting that he had kept hidden for two years. Peruggia underwent a sensational trial, but he was released under celebratory relief that the original painting had been retrieved. The Mona Lisa eventually returned to the Louvre.In 1914 in Casablanca, a scam artist using the moniker Marqués Eduardo de Valiferno disclosed his version of the theft to Hearst reporter Karl Decker. According to Valiferno, he had duped—and paid handsomely—Peruggia and two other Italians to manufacture the actual burglary. The marqués had employed a master forger to replicate six copies to be sold to collectors on the black market, not caring what happened to the original. A question still remains: What ever happened to these half-dozen forgeries if his version were true?Eighteen years later, Karl Decker reframed and embellished another heist description through an article published in the June 25, 1932 issue of the Saturday Evening Post. Decker’s story was based primarily on information from Valiferno but was exaggerated to the degree that cast considerable doubt upon any account’s accuracy. His article merely stirred the controversy without confirming who or why the theft had been perpetrated.Today, the Mona Lisa has become the world’s most secured lady; yet questions about her previous larceny remain unanswered. The La Gioconda story remains as mysterious as her smile continues to baffle art aficionados.A well documented, global discussion with several illustrations, Scotti’s work includes five pages of notes and a five-page bibliography for eager detectives relishing further investigation. Her slim volume is a must-read for any Leonardo fan.
    • 4/5
      Definitely worth reading, the theft and eventual return of Mona Lisa was quite bizarre and Scotti does a good job of explaining both, at least as far as anyone can explain them. I knew Mona Lisa had been stolen at the beginning of the 20th Century but nothing other then that, therefore I was surprised by Morgan and Picasso’s inclusion in the story. Scotti also gives the history of Mona Lisa and the Louvre and how the world’s most famous painting came to reside there. Anyone who watched the 1970's episodes of Dr. Who will see something familiar in one of the possible explanations for the theft.
    • 3/5
      Around the turn of the century, the Mona Lisa disappeared from the Louvre, only to reappear years later. Well researched, this book recounts the national scandal, and the mystery, along with some of the key players. What this book does not do, is reveal what actually happened to the painting on her travels. It seems that this is one cold case that will remain unsolved.
    • 3/5
      Easy read, an interesting story.
    • 1/5
      This is the story of the theft of the Mona Lisa from the Louvre in 1911. It's an interesting series of events, but you can get all the information about it you need from the wikipedia article, which I strongly suggest because the quality of writing in this book is abysmal. The author cannot resist adding flowery, melodramatic, and frequently nonsensical descriptions that practically writhe off the page. The whole thing calls to mind a ninth grader desperately trying to pad an essay.Here's an example:"Night like liquid velvet settled over the mansard roofs, innocent, if a night is ever innocent. A night is young but never innocent, and as Sunday merged with Monday and the city awakened to a new day, the game that would stun Paris and astound the world was afoot."So wait, is the night innocent or not? Because I think that's really key to the crime here. Grade: DRecommended: No, it's very tiresome.
    • 4/5
      Early on the morning of Tuesday, August 22 in the year 1911, a Parisian painter wishing to use La Joconde…better known to the English-speaking world as The Mona Lisa…as a reference for a painting of his own discovered that she was not smiling down from her accustomed place. The guard he asked about the painting’s whereabouts offhandedly assumed it was being photographed for posterity. When, several hours later, the painting had not yet been returned and the museum photographers denied having worked upon it that morning, the scandalous truth was made clear—La Joconde, the most famous of all Leonardo daVinci’s paintings and one of the most famous paintings in the world, had been stolen.The theft proved an international scandal, exposing huge holes in the security of the Louvre…paintings were not secured to the wall and did not need to be accounted for in any way when moved, and the guards were inept and careless, often dozing at their posts. The international attention on the case only put more pressure on the police and detectives pursuing a trail that was already almost a day old before it was discovered. Multiple theories of the crime were considered, from a love-sick admirer of the painting to an unscrupulous American art collector. Even Pablo Picasso and Guillaume Apollinaire, thought to have connections to a ring of art thieves, fell under suspicion during the two years the painting was missing. Even once the painting was eventually found in the possession of a misguidedly patriotic young Italian, questions and mysteries remained.R.A. Scotti’s account of the crime and the two-year quest to bring the painting home is compulsively readable, drawing a vivid picture of Paris and the world at the end of the Belle Epoque.
    • 2/5
      Interesting read into the history of the mona lisa. Sometimes slow and dragging, it never pulled me in. In the lines of Seabiscit, the book wanted to be more than it was. Perhaps there is no greater story behind the mona lisa than can compare to the original.
    • 3/5
      Leonardo's 'Mona Lisa' is perhaps the most famous painting in the world, and it is therefore difficult for the modern reader to imagine it disappearing from the Louvre without anyone noticing. But it did. And thereby hangs an interesting tale. Or would, if all the facts of the theft were known. Unfortunately, the theft wasn't solved; the perpetrators remain unknown, and R.A. Scotti is left to write a slim book based on the speculation surrounding the disappearance. All books never please all readers and I found this one to be a bit on the boring side - which was a personal blow since both the Louvre and art history are two of my abiding interests. Have you ever known a scholar who makes a small, interesting discovery and then tries to turn his 'one liner' into a book? This is the feeling I have with 'Vanished Smile.' It would have been a perhaps riveting article in a periodical, but there's not enough fact here for a full length book. Hence, one supposes, the digressions on French history, Leonardo's style and technique, photography, newspaper circulation and the fruitless speculation on the identity of the thieves. Nevetheless, the book seems to please many reviewers, so give it a good look before you decide whether or not to buy. You might enjoy it more than I did.