This Wednesday in October 2020, while the museums are still open, Jean-François walks the Louvre.
In the deserted Hall of States, devoted in particular to the Venetian Renaissance, he comes to a stop in front of the
Mona Lisa
.
Tourists are scarce, pandemic obliges.
He took the opportunity to offer himself a tête-à-tête with the one the painter Vasari nicknamed, in 1550, Mona Lisa.
Mona for Madonna, a diminutive to express all the majesty, the tenderness and the perfume of the absolute lent to the Virgin.
Since his first meeting with her, in 1990, the 71-year-old retiree has visited her two or three times each year: "We feel in her an interior joy, as if she held the secret of happiness", explains Jean-François.
Mona Lisa -
jucundus
in Latin,
giocondo
in Italian - means "happy".
A charisma which is worth to this painting - the most famous in the world, bought 4,000 ecus (nearly 15 kilos of fine gold) in 1518 by François I - to attract most of the 10 million visitors to the Louvre each year.
Nestled in the midnight blue immensity of the place, Leonardo da Vinci's work is captivating, in particular thanks to the mysterious and mutinous smile of Mona Lisa.
She fascinated Warhol, Dali, Modigliani ...
This charm has captivated writers for five centuries: “His limpid eyes had the glow of life.
[...] The execution of this painting is to make all artists tremble with fear, ”wrote the painter and author Giorgio Vasari in the 16th century.
George Sand, Jules Michelet and Théophile Gautier made it accessible to the public with their texts and their sometimes inflamed references.
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Copied, diverted, it meets in the 20th century its first popular success.
In a subversive tribute, the plastic artist Marcel Duchamp draws it in 1919 decked out with a thin mustache, the pop artist Andy Warhol multiplies it, the painter Fernando Botero enlarges it, the musician Serge Gainsbourg mocks it, and the artists Savaldor Dali, Jean- Michel Basquiat, Amedeo Modigliani and Roy Lichtenstein reinterpret it.
The “Mona Lisa”, seen by the Colombian painter Fernando Botero, is on display in Bogota, the country's capital./Getty/Thierry Falise
In 2014, 11,000 documents and objects entered museum collections under the label “jocondology”.
But it was
Da Vinci Code
, Dan Brown's bestseller (86 million copies sold), which completed the work of the Renaissance into a phenomenon of pop culture at the turn of the 2000s.
VIDEO. How a French artist sent a "Mona Lisa" into space
“There are paintings 250 times more beautiful.
The fascination that this generates is linked to that which exists for Leonardo da Vinci ”, explains the writer Sophie Chauveau, author of a novel and a biography on the magnetic artist, a genius at the same time a military engineer, architect, botanist, philosopher, poet, sculptor and painter.
But it also has a link with its mysterious origins: the painted woman is an illustrious unknown.
But who is she?
Over the centuries, theories have multiplied about it: self-portrait of the Italian master, homage to his mother, to his impetuous pupil and lover Salai, representation of an Italian countess, Catherine Sforza, allegory of happiness ... Behind the roundness of these traits, experts agree in seeing Lisa Gherardini, the second wife of a Florentine silk merchant, Francesco del Giocondo.
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A hypothesis that Silvano Vinceti, an arts lover, has been trying to verify for nearly ten years.
On May 10, 2011, the Italian - a disputed figure in the research - summoned televisions from around the world to Florence, Italy, to the ruins of the ex-convent of Sant'Orsola, to attend his excavation archaeological: 1,000 m2 passed through ground penetrating radar to exhume Lisa Gherardini's skeleton.
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This discovery would make it possible to reconstruct the face of Mona Lisa and to compare her genetic imprint to those of her children, buried in the basilica of Santissima Annunziata.
After hundreds of hours of studying the smallest fragment, Silvano Vinceti is annoyed: among the three burials unearthed, none is intact.
It is therefore impossible to model and authenticate the Mona Lisa.
Stolen in 1911, exfiltrated in 1939
Stolen, hidden, coveted, this painting has an incredible story to match the mysteries that surround it.
Mona Lisa plays the timid.
Armored and tightly guarded, she has not allowed anyone to approach since she was delighted.
A disappearance that is one of the most incredible episodes in the history of art.
It was 9 a.m. on Tuesday August 22, 1911, when the painter Louis Béroud entered the Salon Carré du Louvre.
He has a date with the Mona Lisa… but she has disappeared.
The alert was given, the museum closed and 70 inspectors were dispatched.
Officials celebrate the painting's return to Paris on January 4, 1914. / FPG / Getty / Paul Thompson
The Elysée fulminates, the affair makes the headlines and the police hear half of Paris.
She accuses two German students, a convict escaped from Guyana, suspects Pablo Picasso and imprisons Guillaume Apollinaire.
For two years, the investigation slipped.
The inspectors, however, questioned the culprit they heard as a witness, Vincenzo Peruggia, a worker without history who secured the most prestigious paintings of the Parisian establishment.
Discreet, with a handlebar mustache, slicked back hair, the man has everything but the profile of a thief.
So, when he leaves the museum on August 21, in the early hours of the day, eyes glide over his restless figure.
No one notices the paint hidden under her blouse.
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500 years ago, the “Mona Lisa” emigrated to France
For more than two years, the 29-year-old Italian immigrant shared her studio on rue de l'Hôpital-Saint-Louis with her and dreamed of returning it to her country.
On November 29, 1913, he decided: “The work of Leonardo da Vinci is in my possession.
[...] To restore this masterpiece to the land from which it came, to the places which inspired it, that is my dream!
»He wrote to a Florentine antiquarian, Alfredo Geri.
A meeting is fixed in Florence to authenticate it.
Peruggia jumps on a train and turns up at 12 Borgo-Onissanti Street.
Two days later, on December 14, 1913, the Italian police arrested him.
The worker will do a short year in prison.
Twenty-six years later, the Mona Lisa's keepers have learned their lesson.
She then leaves the Louvre under close surveillance.
Hidden in a wooden case soberly labeled LP0 (for “Louvre Paintings code zero”) and marked with three red pastilles (the object is prestigious), the masterpiece of Vinci leaves the museum on August 28, 1939 towards Chambord.
For five years, Mona Lisa will cross France to escape the Germans, not returning to Paris until August 15, 1945.
A masterpiece now untransportable
Homebody, the
Mona Lisa
however crossed the Atlantic in 1963, for a diplomatic excursion.
Embarked aboard the liner France in December 1962, she landed on the east coast of the United States.
Welcomed by President Kennedy in Washington, escorted by Minister of Culture André Malraux and guarded 24 hours a day by a marine, the painting attracts more than 1.6 million visitors to the Met in New York in less than three months.
In 1963, President Kennedy (left) and his wife Jackie (in pink) welcome Culture Minister André Malraux (center).
/ Walter Bennett / The Life Picture Collection via Getty Images
By order of the Elysee, but against the advice of the conservatives, she will again play ambassadors in April 1974. Direction Tokyo this time - after a stopover in Moscow negotiated by the USSR in exchange for an air pass.
Now unthinkable trips: "Over time, the picture painted on a thin poplar wood panel has bent and has a visible slit on the back, left side", explains Vincent Pomarède, former chief curator of the paintings department. .
A three-month loan to the museum in Lens would cost, for example, nearly 35 million euros.
Unthinkable.
The price of a myth which is not about to be extinguished and which is now associated with the future.
An intuition that the producer and living art theorist Florent Aziosmanoff explored in his project
Living Mona Lisa
, a 3D
Mona Lisa
animated by artificial intelligence that will be marketed in the spring.
“A work of art transmits the spirit of its author.
The
Mona Lisa
is an absolute curiosity, an infinite desire to know, to understand and a total absence of complacency, ”he concludes admiringly.