Vanished Smile (24 page)

Many towns boasted their own forger. In Siena, an art restorer named Icilio Federico Ioni manufactured original paintings from the Quattrocento. In Modena, a painter aptly named Malatesta produced Titians on demand. And in Paris, after years spent cranking out perfect Murillos, the adroit Yves Chaudron turned to a more lucrative Renaissance master.

The marques and his master forger were at the right place at the right time with the right experience to hatch the most brazen art swindle ever attempted. They would sell Mona Lisa not once but six times. It was a classic sting, elegant in its simplicity. Chaudron would paint six Mona Lisas. Valfierno would steal the original and sell each forgery to a millionaire collector as the authentic Leonardo. Since she could never be shared or even acknowledged, each buyer would believe that he possessed the true Mona Lisa. The Mexican enterprise had been a virtual dry run—excellent training for their new and most remarkable coup.

“In selling that famous Murillo sometimes several times a week,” the marques explained to Decker, “I learned of that queer quirk in the brain of the collector that will cause him to buy what he can never sell again, what he can never exhibit and what will have to be kept hidden at all times.”

A PERFECT CRIME
, like a perfect cognac, should be swirled and savored, and with what Decker called “that strange quirk
of vanity characteristic of the creative crook,” the marques recounted each step.

In the initial stage, Yves Chaudron became a habitue of the Louvre, his easel set up openly in the Salon Carré. Because of museum policy, he could not make his copy the same size as the original. Unfazed, Chaudron began a smaller replica of the Mona Lisa. He possessed exquisite dexterity as a forger, and his copy was exact in every detail. Enlarged slightly, it became his template.

While Chaudron painted in the Louvre, Valfierno traveled to Italy in search of an antique bed or armoire dating from around 1500. A headboard or the back panel of a chest, the wood seasoned by time and nature, was large enough to cut into six panels, measuring thirty-one-by-twenty-one-inches. Each would be a near-match to Leonardo's.

After purchasing an armoire of the required age and size and cutting the panels, the conspirators chopped up the remains and fed them to a fire in Chaudron's studio. He was upset because they had destroyed a beautiful antique, but Valfierno laughed and assured his friend that in a few months, he could buy another armoire—or a hundred more, each older and more beautiful.

In Paris, the marques established luxurious headquarters on the Left Bank and stocked the place with cases of Chambertin, Roederer Cristal, and Napoleon Courvoisier. Fine wines, vintage champagne, and the smoothest cognac, served in Baccarat crystal, were necessary lubricants. While Valfierno prepared his seduction, Chaudron primed the panels to seal the wood. He undoubtedly followed the typical Renaissance procedure, first covering the bare wood with two successive layers of gesso and leaving it to dry. Depending on the weather, that would take at least two days. When the gesso dried, he applied a thick coating of white lead to form a binder between the panel and the paints. Without a binder, the wood would
absorb the oil-based colors. When the panels dried, he went over each one with a pumice stone, sanding it until it was as smooth as a block of ice.

Often called “the second oldest profession,” art forgery dates at least to the Roman Empire, when Athenian sculptors incised the signatures of Phidias and Praxiteles on their own inferior works, then sold them to their Roman conquerors as originals. The ancient Greeks never signed their sculpture, but the rubes from Rome did not know that. While forgery continued on a modest scale through the Renaissance when Ghiberti and Michelangelo created their own fake antiquities, the ancient profession reached pandemic levels only when American magnates entered the market. Renaissance paintings were the most speculative, the most desired, and the most frequently faked.

Forging is itself a fine art, and quality runs from crude imitation to near-flawless likeness. To fake the most famous face in art history was both daring and daunting. It required extraordinary precision and technical accuracy. A master like Chaudron would consult the best sources from Leonardo's time to learn which materials were available to him. Chaudron's bible would have been I
l Libra dell’ Arte
, by Cennino Cennini. It was the authoritative source on the techniques and materials used by Renaissance and pre-Renaissance artists.

Chaudron would never make an obvious mistake, such as using cobalt blue, Chinese white, or cadmium yellow, paints popular in 1911 but not available in the 1500s. He would have mixed his own paints according to Renaissance formulas. Mona Lisa's true colors were probably never vivid, but they were clearer and brighter than the now muddy shades. Age, humidity, numerous varnishings, and botched conservation attempts had distorted Leonardo's palette, grays and greens turning to brown and blues to green. Chaudron had to compensate accordingly.

Although Leonardo's original colors can only be guessed, he probably used walnut oil as a base and had Verona green, lapis lazuli, red ocher, vermilion, and burnt umber on his palette. He may have added a trace of the vermilion directly to the white lead base coat to enhance Mona Lisa's skin tone. He also may have applied fine layers of burnt umber directly onto the undercoat to create shadows.

Color was only one of many challenges Mona Lisa presented to a forger. Leonardo did not mix his paints on a palette. He applied each one directly to the panel, painting the thinnest layers of color, one on top of the other, and achieving effects of great delicacy, blurring the edges particularly around the corners of the eyes and mouth. Mona Lisa is softly seductive, not an overtly provocative painted lady of the night, all hard edges and bold come-ons. She is ephemeral in her charms, perceived through the gentle play of shadow and light, and like a shadow, slipping away when you think your grasp is firm.

Blending color and glazes through multiple layers, so thin that they are almost transLucént, gives Mona Lisa her unique aura. It creates the blurred
sfumato
effect, as if she is seen through a fine mist or a haze of smoke. Leonardo's brushstrokes are imperceptible, and his shades meld. Even in the landscape behind her, there are no distinct changes in color. The absence of defined edges to follow was a further test of Chaudron's skill.

Once the image was replicated, he had to force the paint to crack to mimic the fissures that mar the painting's surface. According to recent scientific studies,
craquelure
has various causes. That detailed technical information was not known in 1911, and Chaudron probably falsified the defect called premature
craquelure
caused by the way the artist layered the paint. If Chaudron applied a color with a low oil content over an oilier one, the upper layer of paint would dry before the under layer, causing the surface to crack. Or he might have ereated
the
craquelure
with a needle, scratching a web of lines in the outer layer of varnish, then rubbing dirt into the cracks with a pad of cotton wool. Finally, a forger of Chaudron's quality would not neglect the back. Using a fine drill, he would simulate the damage caused by insects. Woodworms feast on old panel paintings, tunneling into the backs because they do not like paint.

No artist can reproduce every line, every shadow, and every dimension of a painting. There will always be small deviations that may not affect the general appearance but are undeniable. If the best forgery is placed beside the original, an expert may spot the differences. Further investigation would reveal the fraud. But Chaudron's Mona Lisas would never be seen with Leonardo's. That was the beauty of the game. Doubt was eliminated. No comparison would ever be made or even believed possible, because each buyer would be convinced that he possessed the one true da Vinci. It was more than a perfect crime, the marques boasted; it was a service to mankind.

“I shall always contend that a forged painting so cleverly executed as to puzzle experts is as valuable an addition to the art wealth of the world as the original,” he told Decker. “If the beauty is there in the picture, why cavil at the method by which it was obtained.”

GIVEN THE COMPLEXITY
of the enterprise, Chaudron painted quickly. When the paint dried on each new work, the marques sailed to the States. To avoid arousing suspicion, he made six separate trips over the span of a year. On each crossing, he carried a new Mona Lisa in his Vuitton luggage. Reproductions of masterworks had become commonplace, and each
time he declared his cargo and passed through New York customs without incident.

By early summer 1911, the sting was set. The six forgeries were stashed safely in a New York bank vault and ready for sale, each with a price tag roughly equivalent to $15 million today. The six sheep were lined up to be fleeced. Only one step remained. Mona Lisa had to vanish from the Louvre.

For this final detail, Valfierno needed someone with inside knowledge of the museum, and he recruited Vincenzo “Leonardo” Peruggia. Peruggia was an artisan, possessing precise knowledge and craft. Since he had been employed by the Louvre, he was both familiar with the museum and a familiar presence to the guards, and since he had built the glass box frame for Mona Lisa, he could remove the painting easily. He, in turn, recruited two accomplices, the Lancelotti brothers.

Valfierno had begun wooing Peruggia while he was working as a framer at the Louvre, and they rehearsed every detail of the operation numerous times over a period of weeks and months. The marques provided a master key, a map of the museum, and more francs than Peruggia had ever imagined possessing in his lifetime—and that was only a first installment.

As Valfierno related the story, late in the afternoon of Sunday, August 20, the three men visited the Louvre. One of them carried a brown paper parcel tied with string and containing the uniform of museum workers, three starched, knee-length white smocks. They lingered in the Salon Carré. The crowds were thin, and the guard was drowsy. By the four o'clock closing hour, the three had disappeared.

As the museum emptied for the night, Peruggia led the men to a storage room between the Galerie d'Apollon and the Salle Duchâtel, where the copyists stored their supplies. Crouched in the darkness in the cramped closet, wedged among easels and paint boxes, the friends shared a hunk of cheese and a small flask of wine and waited for morning.

Because the Louvre was closed to the public on Mondays, the only people in the galleries would be maintenance men and security guards. Around six-thirty a.m., the museum workers began arriving. The three thieves, now dressed in the anonymous white smocks, mingled easily. The marques relished the simplicity of their disguise.

“It was a psychological tour de force. Our success depended upon one thing—the fact that a workman in a white blouse in the Louvre is as free from suspicion as an unlaid egg.”

He had mapped an exact route for the men to follow through the museum complex and out to the street. They would lift Mona Lisa from the wall and carry her through the Salon Carré into the Grande Galerie. There they would turn to the right and continue through to the Salle de Sept-Metres, where the Italian primitives hung. In the right wall at the corner, a door led to a back stairway used only by museum employees. They would carry Mona Lisa down the stairs, unlock the door at the bottom, and go through to the Cour du Sphinx. Across the court was the Cour Visconti, where a door opened to the street. There they would remove their smocks and exit the museum.

The first stage proceeded flawlessly. The usual attendant did not come in, which left one guard to cover the Grande and Petite Galeries, the Salon Carré, and the Salon d'Apollon. When that guard took a cigarette break, Peruggia and his accomplices saw their opportunity.

Peruggia was a small man, and lifting Mona Lisa off the wall was not a simple feat for him. The wood panel with the frame and the glass box were cumbersome. With one of the Lancelottis serving as lookout, Peruggia and the other brother removed the painting. They passed unnoticed through the three empty galleries to the service stairway. On the small landing, Peruggia took a screwdriver from his pocket and, working quickly, unfastened the outer frame. Opening the
glass box that he had constructed was easy, but taking the painting out of the ornate antique frame, the marques said, “had them sweating.” Packing paper—stuffed inside to hold the panel in place—ripped, leaving a paper trail across the landing.

Although it seemed an eternity, in five minutes, Mona Lisa was free. Pushing the two frames into a corner of the landing, Peruggia slid the painting under his smock and dashed down the stairs. The Lancelottis returned to the Salle de Sept-Metres to keep watch. The operation was proceeding perfectly. “Then,” the marques confided, “for the first time our beautiful scheme failed to click.” The door at the bottom of the staircase was locked, and the key he had given Peruggia did not fit. He blamed the Italian for being careless. Valfierno had repeatedly instructed Peruggia to go to the Louvre and test the key. The Italian had failed to carry out orders, and the escape route was blocked.

Valfierno's voice dropped dramatically. “Imagine. That one little lapse nearly ruined us.”

Peruggia still had the screwdriver he had used to open the frames, and again he worked quickly. He had removed the brass doorknob and was starting on the lock when he heard his lookouts whistle. The coast was no longer clear.

Peruggia was sitting on the bottom steps in an attitude of annoyance, leaning lightly against Mona Lisa, who was behind his back, hidden under his smock, when the plumber Sauve padded down the stairs and became an unwitting accomplice. The instant Peruggia heard the footsteps behind him, he began cursing that some fool had locked the door. Sauve, using his master key and a pair of pliers, opened it. After that helpful deed, the rest was a cakewalk.

Telling Peruggia to leave the door ajar until the knob could be replaced, the plumber went on his merry way, and Mona Lisa went on hers. The brothers joined Peruggia, and together,
they crossed the Cour du Sphinx and entered the Cour Visconti. The Porte Visconti entrance by the side of the Seine was unattended. The guard, who had been washing the vestibule, had gone for a fresh bucket of water and stopped on his way back to rest in the sun. The thieves could see him under a red umbrella, sleeping soundly. Taking off their smocks, they slipped out of the museum. By nine o'clock, Peruggia was hurrying along the Quai du Louvre, the Leonardo, wrapped in the white museum smock, in his arms and his accomplices on the lookout behind him.