★ The Thefts of the ‘Mona Lisa’: The Complete Story of the World’s Most Famous Artwork

Noah Charney. Rowman and Littlefield, $32 (176p) ISBN 978-1-5381-8136-2

argues, with his antibillionaire invective and proposals for Medicare for All, free college, and paid family leave, and brought leftist protest movements into mainstream politics through his presidential campaign. Then Alexandria OcasioCortez, a Sanders campaign volunteer, brought youthful identity politics to the Democratic progressive wing with her 2018 primary upset of New York congressman Joe Crowley. As background, Green shrewdly analyzes the pendulum swings in the post-Watergate Democratic Party—a chapter on Tony Coelho, a Democratic congressman and megafund-raiser who pivoted the Party toward Wall Street donors in the 1980s, is especially illuminating—and evocatively conveys his subjects’ charisma. Readers will gain new insight into an epochal shift in American politics. (Jan.)

Historian Charney (Brushed Aside) tracks the eventful life of the Mona Lisa in this rollicking account. Florentine nobleman Francesco del Giocondo commissioned Leonardo da Vinci to paint a portrait of his wife Lisa in 1503. When the artist died in 1519 France, the still-unfinished painting passed into the hands of his assistant Salai, who sold it to French king François I. Following that exchange, the painting came into the possession of Napoleon, who hung it on his bedroom wall at the Tuilleries Palace. In the early 1800s, it became part of the permanent collection at the Louvre, from where it was stolen in 1911 by Italian handyman Vincenzo Peruggia, who sought to “repatriate” the painting to Florence, falsely believing that Napoleon had looted it from his country a century before. (At one point during the ensuing investigation, suspicion fell on Pablo Picasso because he’d bought Iberian statues stolen from the Louvre several years before.) After the Mona Lisa was recovered in 1913 with the help of an Italian gallery owner, French curators hid the artwork in chateaus during WWII, though Charney notes a nearly threeyear gap in which its whereabouts are still undocumented. Throughout, Charney succeeds in separating myth and legend from fact as he uncovers the background behind the artwork’s celebrity. The result is both a thrilling tale of true crime and a rigorous work of art history. (Feb.)