Michael Prodger
How many Mona Lisas are there?
the Mona Lisa is now an
immovable object. The last time the painting left the Louvre was in 1974 when it was loaned to Russia and Japan and it will probably never travel again. Before that, it had left France just twice since Leonardo brought it in his baggage when he moved to the Loire valley in 1516 to see out the last years of his life as the guest of Francis I.
In 1963, the painting travelled to America in a deal brokered by Jacqueline Kennedy and André Malraux, the French minister of culture. Despite a furore at home about potential damage, the painting crossed the Atlantic on board the SS France.
The White House had assured the French government that the picture would receive the same level of Secret Service protection as JFK himself, so it was accompanied into New York harbour by the US Coast Guard and when it was displayed in Washington it was flanked by two marines, while in New York detectives circulated the room. When the Mona Lisa returned to France three months later she had been seen by more than one million Americans.
Her American sojourn was not without incident, however. Half way through the trip, an antiques dealer named Raymond Hekking made the sensational claim that the painting the American public were busily swooning over was a fake. The real painting, he said, was in his possession and he cited as evidence the only other time the
Mona Lisa had left French soil.
This occurred in 1911 when Vincenzo Peruggia, an Italian working at the Louvre, stole the painting and took it to Florence. The painting wasn’t returned until 1913 and it was during its missing years, claimed Hekking, that the real painting was swapped for a fake that now hung on the Louvre’s walls. The original, he said had somehow ended up in Nice, where he had bought it from a dealer in the early-1950s for about £3.
Hekking was an astute publicist
and he invited journalists and television crews to his home in Grasse to examine the picture (below) and bombarded prominent Renaissance connoisseurs with supposed proof of its status. He also arranged for Pathé to make a film, Mona Lisa Sensation, about the “discovery”.
Hekking, who died in 1977, spent the rest of his life trying to prove his claims but