May 30, 2024 • 30 mins
How did the Mona Lisa get so famous? Why doesn't she have any eyebrows? And why was Picasso investigated for the painting's theft? This episode Will and Mango go deep on the smirking beauty and try to figure out what's really going on behind that sly smile.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
You're listening to Part Time Genius, the production of Kaleidoscope
and iHeartRadio. Guess what will? What's that? Mango? So I'm
trying to write a poem for the Mona Lisa and
I need little help. Rhyme Zone says there's no perfect
rhyme for Mona Lisa. So what do you think rhyme's best?
(00:24):
Like amnesia anesthesia or moesha? Wait, Mango? First of all,
why are you writing Mona Lisa poem? Because even though
there are over a million pieces of art in the Louver,
the Mona Lisa is the only one who actually receives
her own mail, and people have been writing to the
Mona Lisa since the nineteenth century. She even has her
(00:45):
own mailbox because the painting is so enchanting. So I'm curious, So, like,
what what do people actually write? Some of the letters
express how moved people are by the artwork, and some
ask the smirking Beauty for advice, and some of the
letters actually include marriage proposals. It is pretty incredible. I
love that people have a parasocial relationship with a piece
(01:06):
of art. I think it's the first time I've heard
about this. Yeah, and it used to be. For years
you actually have to make a trip to the Louver
to pass along your fan mail tour. But these days
you can actually post a letter to the museid Louver
service de public all attention dey Mona Lisa, which I've
obviously said in a perfect franch accent. You nailed it, Mango,
(01:26):
So I figure, why not add to the file. Well,
in that case, maybe try rhyming Mona Lisa with milk
of Magnesia, Mango. That's where you would have an answer
for me. So why don't we put the poetry aside
for a moment and dive into today's episode, which is
all about the Mona Lisa. Hey, their podcast listeners, I'm
(02:04):
Will Pearson and as always I'm here with my good
friend Mango and sitting behind that big booth that's our
powd Dylan. Now, Mango, I know I got here a
little bit before you did, but Dylan was already here.
I think he had clocked in a good half hour
before I even sat down, and he's been holding that
weird smile Mona Lisa's style for the last hour. Now.
(02:24):
It's really impressive. Yeah, it's weird, but it's also really captivating.
It's also crazy that he shaved his eyebrows. I mean,
it's just spot on to the Mona Lisa. But that's
just the links to Dylan goes to for these bits.
It's truly impressive. Anyway, mego, let's dive in here. So
what is it about the Mona Lisa that is so captivating? Like?
(02:46):
Why do people stand in lines to get into the
louver just so they can stand in this huge crowd
and try to see this painting? Is it just her
smile or like what is it? Yeah? So obviously it's
not just the smile. First of all, it's a super
good painting, which I believe is a direct quote from
our forum. Yeah, I think, I think, I think I
(03:06):
remember seeing that quote. But what makes the painting so unique? Well,
to start with, most sixteenth century portraits of nobility showed
off their social status and their wealth with a lot
of like flamboyant clothing. So the painting's also played up
hair styles and accessories. But you know, if you've seen
the Mona Lisa, which is believed to be this Italian
noble Lisa del Giacondo, it's unique because she's dressed really simply,
(03:30):
all of which draws most of the attention straight to
her face and that weird smile. Yeah, but there's also
other stuff, right, So, typical Italian portraiture used full figure poses,
but Mona Lisa is painted in this revolutionary three fourths
length pose. Also, she's not stoic or demure, which would
be typical of a female portrait. She's she's turning slightly
(03:51):
toward the viewer and she meets our eyes directly like
a man typically would, or a man at the time.
And mod Lisa also showcases some very vinci techniques. What
would those be? Yeah? What is this technique called sfumtu,
which means vanished or evaporated. Basically, Leonardo would create these
imperceptible transitions between light and dark by shading the colors
(04:15):
really gradually so that the background fades into the distance.
It's almost like adding a blur filter. And it's another
deviation from traditional Italian portraiture of the time, which would
paint the backgrounds in this same sharp focus as the
central figure. Actually, is this fuma to also a drink. Yeah,
it's in a marrow, which makes sense because if you
(04:36):
drink enough smatu, things are going to get faded into
the background. Yeah, I just want to say it's Fu
Matu over and over. But this is all cool. But
I do think we should get back to the Mona
Lisa's weird smile. I know I keep bringing it up,
but I feel like we have to talk about it. Yeah,
it's the smile that launched a mediocre two thousand and
three movie emego. It's sixty percent on Rotten Tomato, so
(04:59):
I would say, I don't sleep on it. So I
was up. I just, you know, I like to know
what it gets on rotten tomatoes. But I also looked
into Mona Lisa's smile and it's amazing. Like the preoccupation
with the painting smile dates back to the Renaissance writer
and historian Giorgio Vasari, and he actually said, in this
work of Leonardo, there was a smile so pleasing that
(05:22):
it was a thing more divine than human to behold,
and it was held to be something marvelous in that
it was alive, which sounds spooky. Sounds spooky. But he
also wasn't the only one that was so captivated here.
So the treacherous attraction of Moasa's smile is said to
have consumed French artist Luke Maspero too. According to popular myth,
(05:45):
Maspero allegedly ended his life over it. We actually leapt
from the I know it's crazy, actually leapt from the
fourth story window of his Paris hotel room, and in
the note he left behind, he wrote, for years, I
have grappled desperately her smile. I prefer to die. That's
so dramatic, you know, you know, why would a smile
(06:08):
and a painting drive someone so crazy? It it feels ludicrous. Well,
you know what, there's actually some science here, like, there
are explanations for it. Some people who look at the
painting think she's not smiling at all, and that's because
the human eye uses two types of vision. There's fobial
and there's peripheral. Now, fobial or direct vision is excellent
(06:29):
at picking up detail, but is less suited to picking
up things like shadows, and so, according to Margaret Livingstone,
a professor at Harvard Quote, the elusive quality of the
Mona Lisa smile can be explained by the fact that
her smile is almost entirely in low spatial frequencies and
so is seen best by your peripheral vision. It's almost
(06:50):
like an optical illusion, like the more a person stares
straight ahead, the less their peripheral vision actually works. Oh
that's really cool. So I'm at the I'm staring at
the Mona Lisa because I want to take it all
in and get my money's worth. But the harder I stare,
the harder it is for my vision to register that smile.
That's exactly right. And it's only when you start looking
(07:11):
at other parts of the painting, like the background or
hands or the chair, that's when your eyes really pick
up on the smile, which could sort of strike you
as alive, right because it's not there, and it suddenly
appears like Mona Lisa is finally deigned to smile at you,
the sweaty jet lag tourists who's come all the way
to friends to see her. I mean, that's the theory, Mango.
(07:33):
You know what's funny is that I'm really glad you
mentioned the chair. Wait, chair, What did I say about
the chair? I don't think I said anything about the chair,
did I Just that it exists? It trikes out chair.
The chair is one of the most interesting parts of
the Mona Lisa, and one that art historians actually focus
on specifically, it's a Pozetto chair, which means little well,
(07:55):
which some historians believe is a reference to the amphibious
nature of Mona Lisa. She's surrounded by water, She's wearing
this green dress, and if you know she's sitting on
a little well, you can imagine the rivers behind her
are flowing into her. Mm hmm. It's obviously a rich
and surprising and ingeniously conceived work of art. But here's
what I've always been stuck on with the Mona Lisa.
(08:16):
Like the Renaissance had I don't know if you know this,
but a lot of really super good paintings Mago, which
also sounds like a quote from Art Forum straight from it.
But seriously, I've always wondered what made the Mona Lisa
stick out amongst all this amazing art, And through our research,
I finally found the answer, Mango. It's the vibes. Vibes, yeah, yeah, well,
(08:38):
the vibes and incredible marketing, like the Mona Lisa is
like the Jeremy Allen White of Renaissance paintings. I don't
even know what that means. All right, well, hear me
out on this. So even before it was in the loop,
the Mona Lisa started out hot like it had this
great pedigree. It was in the royal collection of the
literal King of France, Francis the First, and who's court
(08:59):
Leonardo spent the last years of his life. The painting
was there for centuries until the French Revolution claimed the
royal collection as the property of the people. Then Napoleon
took it and placed it in his bedroom because he
loved it that much, and then finally it landed in
the Louver. Sure, so there's like a lot of history
there of being owned by important people. But it was
(09:21):
also the heat around Leonardo da Vinci that helped grow
interest in the Mona Lisa, because something happened in the
nineteenth century where Leonardo became more popular, you know, see
not only as a very good painter, but also as
a great scientist and inventor of course, and many of
his so called inventions were later debunked, and his contributions
to science and architecture came to be seen as you know,
(09:43):
less than they might have been at first. But this
idea of Leonardo as a genius has continued well into
the twenty first century, and that of course has contributed
to the Mona Lisa's popularity. But then there was Marcel
Duchamp's contribution to the painting. So you're talking about Deschamp.
The data is too, you know, made all that fun
crazy art, like signed that urinal and entered it into
(10:04):
an art exhibition. Back guy, Yeah, very same guy. So
Duchamp took a postcard reproduction of the Mona Lisa. This
was back in nineteen nineteen. He drew a beard and
mustache on it. It was like this playful depiction. It
was meant to be in irreverent commentary about the worship
of art. But he also wrote lhoo q across the
(10:25):
bottom of the postcard, which sounds like, look right, is
that us? What was I mean? Exactly? Well, it's a
vulgar phrase for I guess you could say she's hot,
But the polite translation is there is fire down below,
got it? You've never written that on anything anyway. The
(10:47):
depiction of the Mona Lisa became a huge thing to
deface of this revered work of art as commentary, and
before a long other artists followed suit and distorted disfigure.
They played with rep reductions of the Mona Lisa, including
Andy Warhol. Actually, over decades, as technology improved, the painting
was endlessly reproduced, sometimes manipulated, sometimes not, and so her
(11:11):
face became one of the most well known in the world,
even to people who don't really care about art. Right, so,
I may have never been to the Loof or never
even heard of Leo da Vinci, But by the twentieth century,
even if I hate art, it's hard to avoid the
Mona Lisa's presence. That's exactly right. In fact, in the
nineteen sixties and seventies, the Mona Lisa was so famous
(11:32):
she went on tour. She traveled to the US and
a first class cabin on an ocean liner drew about
forty thousand people a day to the Metropolitan Museum in
New York City and then in the National Gallery of
Art in Washington, DC, and then after that she went
on to Japan. And of course the popularity was only
increased by that heist too, Right, wait, there was a heist.
(11:54):
It is really really fun, But why don't we take
a quick break before we get to that. Welcome back
(12:14):
to Part Time Genius, where we're discussing the Mona Lisa
and Mango. You were just telling us about an art
theft involving da Vinci's most famous painting. Is that right?
That's right. So in nineteen eleven, the Mona Lisa had
made it to the Louver, a huge museum in Paris,
literally huge like. At the time, the Louver was the
largest building in the world, with more than a thousand
(12:35):
rooms spread out over forty five acres. Can you believe,
Oh my gosh, that's ridiculous. So what is the heating
bill on a place like that? Can you imagine? Nothing?
Because it's France, so it's just cold, all right, A
good point, that's fair. Anyways, it was a quiet Monday
morning in Paris on the twenty first of August nineteen eleven,
and three men were hurrying out of the Louver, which
(12:56):
is odd so that the museum was closed to visitors
on Mondays. The men were Vincenzo Perusia and the brothers,
Vincenzo and Michelle Lancelotti. They're these young Italian handymen. They
had come to the Louver on Sunday afternoon, hidden overnight
in a storeroom near the Salon care A gallery of
Renaissance paintings, and then in the morning wearing white workmen's smocks,
(13:19):
they went into the salon and seized a small painting
off the wall. They ripped off the glass, shadow box
and frame, and then they went to a stairwell and
Perusia hid the painting under his clothes, and then they
slipped out of the gallery down a back stairwell, threw
a side entrance and onto the streets of Paris. And
so they stole the Mona Lisa. Yeah, they stole the
Mona Lisa. It took twenty six hours before the louver
(13:42):
staff even noticed that it was missing. You have to
remember how big the louver is, right, and in nineteen
eleven there were fewer than one hundred and fifty guards
looking out for all of that art. I'm curious, So, like,
how did they plan it and why did they steal it? Like,
give me the Ocean's ta plot here mango before in
nineteen ten, a letter was mailed to the louver from
(14:02):
Vienna which threatened the Mona Lisa. So museum officials hired
a firm named Kobie to put a dozen of its
most prized paintings under glass, and the work took three months,
and one of the men assigned to the project was
Vincenzo Perusia who was one of the thieves, and Prusia
was this Italian worker on a French construction crew, so
(14:23):
they teased him a lot. Prusia later testified in court
that they quote almost always called me Manja Macaroni or
Macaroni eater, and very often they stole my personal property
and salted my wine. So he was getting at this
French crew. Yeah, and you took it personally. And some
(14:44):
accounts say Prusa was motivated by national pride and he
wanted to repatriate Mona Lisa to Italy. Anyway, there there
was this media explosion when the Louver announced the theft.
Newspaper headlines were all over the place, you know, wanted
posters for the painting were hung on Parisian walls, and
crowds masked at police headquarters. And when the Louver actually
(15:05):
reopened after a week, thousands of spectators, including Franz Kafka,
flooded into the salon to stare at the empty wall
where the Mona Lisa had once been. An empty people
are so weird, like why would people line up to
stare at a blank wall? I mean the grief was remarkable, right,
like the national outpouring. According to historians, mimicked the shock
(15:28):
of Princess Diana's death and where was the actual painting
being kept during all of this? So Prussia had squirreled
the Mona Lisa away in this false bottom of the
wooden trunk in his room at a boardinghouse. And when
the Parisian police interrogated him as part of all their interviews,
because they basically interviewed everyone who was working at the
louver at the time, he said he only learned about
(15:48):
the theft from the newspapers and that the reason he
was late to work that Monday in August was that
he had drunk too much the night before and overslept.
But Prusia ultimately wanted money for this world famous painting,
so he twenty eight months and then in December nineteen thirteen,
he left that boarding house with the trunk and he
took a train to Florence, where he tried to offload
the painting to an art dealer, who promptly called the police.
(16:12):
He then had a brief trial in Florence, pleaded guilty,
and ended up serving just eight months in prison. I mean,
I guess it's a fairly happy ending of the story, then, yeah,
and the painting actually went on tour in Italy briefly
before it got sent back to France. But the theft
made the Mona Lisa a global icon. In the first
two days after it was rehung in the Louvers Salon,
(16:33):
more than one hundred thousand people viewed it, and today
eight million people see the Mona Lisa every single year. Wow,
it does feel like Prusia should have gotten like this
pr fee or something like that for boosting the Mona
Lisa's profile. Yeah, but weirdly, you know, there are actually
some conspiracy theories. So some said that theft was the
French government's way of trying to distract the public opinion
(16:56):
from uprisings in colonial West Africa. A few months before
the was found, the New York Times speculated that the
Louver Restores had botched a restoration job and that the
museum was just like concocting this story to cover that up.
There was also a rumor that a gang of international
art thieves had poached the painting and substituted a fake
that was in Perusia's possession when he was caught, which
(17:17):
is all kind of incredible. Whoa really. Yeah, And apparently
this Argentinian also confessed to masterminding the crime. He did
this to American reporter named Carl Decker. He basically said
he paid Perusia and the other two men to steal
the painting because the glass box that protected it weighed
two hundred pounds, so you needed a few men on
the job. And then he said he had six forgeries
(17:40):
made and sold to private collectors. So for a while
there was some question of whether the Mona Lisa and
the Louver was the real deal. And then the other
conspiracy theory around the theft was this whole you know
Picasso thing. Wait what Picasso thing? Yeah, it's kind of incredible.
So during that eighteen month period where the French police
were not arrested the dudes who actually stole the Mona Lisa,
(18:02):
they arrested Pablo Picasso and the poet and critic Guillaume Apollinaire.
It started when this guy, Joseph Gary Pierre went to
the Paris Journal and told them that for the past
several years he'd been stealing and then selling minor artwork
from the Louver, and to prove it, Pire produced a
small statue that the Louver curators confirmed with museums, and
(18:23):
the police eventually connected Piree to Apollinaire, who was a
member of Picasso's modernist entourage. They were called labond de Picasso,
and there were this like group of artistic firebrands known
around town as the wild Men of Paris. And it
wasn't really that big a stretch for the police to
assume this ring of art thieves were sophisticated enough to
(18:45):
swipe the Mona Lisa. Of course, neither Apollinaire nor Picasso
had played any part in that painting's disappearance, all right,
So Picasso and his buddies didn't steal the Mona Lisa.
They were they were innocent. Yeah. Well, the funny thing
is they weren't exactly innocent. Pierre was telling the truth
that Picasso had bought stolen statues from him and kept
(19:06):
them buried in this cupboard in his Paris apartment. And
you know, later the artist pretended ignorance, like he didn't
know they were stolen. But at the bottom of every
statue it was stamped in bold property of de Louver.
That's not a good look. Yeah, And it got weirder
because when pire got put on trial, it kind of
ended up being like this massive farce. Picasso and his
(19:30):
friends confessed to putting their stolen statues in this old
suitcase and almost throwing the bag into the sind before
realizing they couldn't destroy this incredible art. So upon Air
confesses to everything on the stand, but he also throws
in a lot of lies, and Picasso, who normally liked
to project, you know, a supermasho image, he breaks down
(19:51):
and weeps and also says a lot of nonsense, and
it all confuses the judge and he gets baffled by
the whole thing and then ultimately just dismisses the men
with a warning. But because's involvement obviously only brought the
Mona Lisa more press, that is so funny, all right, Well,
let's take a moment to talk about who the Mona
(20:11):
Lisa actually is. Like, who is this woman whose portrait
has been reproduced a ridiculous amount of times for five
hundred plus years. Yeah, it's funny because I feel like
there used to be a real mystery about who the
Mona Lisa was. That's right, But back in two thousand
and eight, a German university found conclusive evidence that it's
Lisa Gerdini del Jacondo dated notes from October fifteen oh three,
(20:35):
scribbled in the margins of a book at Heidelberg University's library.
They confirmed that Lisa del Jacondo was indeed the model
and her husband was most likely the man who commissioned
the portrait. The comments comparati Leonardo to the ancient Greek
artist at Pelis and said he was working on three
paintings at the time, one of them a portrait of
Lisa del Jacondo, which sounds pretty conclusive. Yeah, I will
(20:59):
say at c Like for almost any given fact or
assertion about the Mona Lisa, there is someone, often with
the fancy Tyler degree who disputes it, of course, like anything.
But probably the only thing everyone can agree on is
that it's rectangular. But let's go with the Lisa del
Jacondo theory for just a minute. Like, there's been this
long standing theory that Lisa was or had recently been
(21:23):
pregnant when she's set for this portrait, and in two
thousand and four, a series of three D scans essentially
confirmed this. The scans showed this fine gauzy veil around
Mona Lisa's shoulders, this garment that women of the Italian
and Renaissance were when they were expecting it's called a guamelo. Well,
couldn't we just see the veil by looking at the painting? Like,
(21:44):
why do we need three D scans of all of us?
Actually the scans have been able to tell us a
whole lot. Like for a while, there was this big
question over whether the Mona Lisa didn't have eyelashes or eyebrows,
and there was a debate over whether it was just
the fashion at the time or whether maybe leonah Ardo
never actually finished the painting. But an engineer named Pascal
(22:04):
Cote used the scans to reveal traces of the Mona
Lisa's left brow and basically that the lashes have been
obliterated both by time and this long ago restoration. Also,
the scans showed that da Vinci changed his mind about
two fingers on Lisa's left hand and how they were
going to be placed in the painting, and that her
face was originally a little bit wider and the smile
(22:26):
more prominent. So it's really actually a lot that they
can tell from these scans. That's incredible. I had no
idea you could like sort of see beneath the painting.
Call those layers. That's amazing. Yeah, it's really really cool.
But you know your question about the veil. As the
Mona Lisa aged, her veil darkened and it made it
harder to see. But with the confirmation of the veil,
(22:46):
historians were able to confirm that Francesco del ja Condo
asked for the painting of his wife to celebrate the
birth of his second son, which confirms that Mona Lisa
is his wife, Lisa del Giaconda. That's right, actually his
third wife to be exact. So in fourteen ninety five,
at the age of fifteen, Lisa Garadini married prosperous silk
(23:07):
and cloth merchant Francisco di Bartolomeo Diza Nobi del Jacondo.
It's a mouthful there, but that's a pretty awesome name.
Lisa and Francesco ended up having five children, Piero, Camilla,
Andrea Jacondo and Marietta. So that's the Lisa in the
Mona Lisa allegedly. Don't tell me you're getting into conspiracy talk,
(23:30):
care mango, Well, I want to end this episode on
a crazy note. So did you know that some people
believe there are two Mona Lisas. Oh, Basically, there's this
painting that looks a lot like the Mona Lisa. It's
a painting of a younger woman, kind of like a fresher,
younger Mona Lisa, with dark hair and an enigmatic smile
that sits at a slight angle in front of a
(23:52):
panoramic landscape, which obviously sounds familiar. It's called the Aleworth
Mona Lisa, and long story short, it got passed around
different art collectors over the centuries, including American collector Henry F. Pulitzer.
Pulitzer published a book arguing that the Aleworth picture was
in fact Leonardo's only real portrait of Mona Lisa. The
(24:12):
way did Leonardo actually paint this one? I mean, some
people think so, namely the Mona Lisa Foundation, who have
a vested interest in, you know, furthering this theory, but
most art scholars don't believe. So it's painted on canvas,
and Leonardo usually painted on wood, and they basically say
that it's just not good enough to be by Leonardo
(24:34):
da Vinci. It's just like a bad copy of the
Mona Lisa. But speaking of bad copy, what do you
say we get into the fact of wow? I like
what you did there, manga, Let's do it all right. So,
one of the strangest things about the Mona Lisa is
(24:56):
that it's been attacked. A bunch in nineteen fifty six
threw a rock at it, which chipped the subject's left elbow.
Over the years, people have thrown acid on it, They've
tried to face it with spray paint, They've thrown a
mug at it, and weirdest of all, it had a
cake thrown in its face as recently as twenty twenty two.
That is so weird and disheartening, you know. According to
(25:20):
a book by Diane Hales, over the years, the Mona
Lisa has launched a number of fashion trends, and this
is what she writes. Quote Society women adopted the Mona
Lisa's look by dusting yellow powder on their faces and
necks to suggest her golden complexion, and immobilizing their facial
muscles to mimic her smile, which sounds like an early
(25:40):
imitation of botox. Also quote. In Parisian cabarets, dancers dressed
as Laja Conde, the French name for Mona Lisa, and
performed a saucy can can all right, that's pretty good.
All right, Well, did you know, in trying to figure
out who the Mona Lisa was, scientists have actually dug
up bones beneath a convent in Florence. Apparently one of
(26:02):
Lisa's daughters became a nun and in her old age
she moved into the convent with her daughter. So scientists
went digging beneath this chapel. They found bones that do
match up timeline wise with Lisa's death, but they were
hoping to use digital imaging on the skeleton to compare
it to the painting. But apparently there was no skull
found with the bones, and that means her face couldn't
(26:24):
actually be digitally reconstructed. So here's a fun one. To
keep his subject smiling or half smiling, Da Vinci had
a whole bag of tricks. He apparently employed six musicians
to perform for her, had people reading stories out loud
to her, and also had a fluffy white cat and
a greyhound dog for her to play with on set.
(26:45):
All right, will people often speculate how much the Mona
Lisa is worse. Back in nineteen sixty two, when the
painting went on tour, the price was placed at about
one hundred million dollars, which is around eight hundred and
thirty four million dollars in today's currency, but others estimated
it's actually worth more. One Entre Dour placed it in
the billions of dollars because of its value to France
(27:08):
and the amount of tourism the painting generates. Of course,
all of that is actually mood because it's illegal to
buy or sell the Mona Lisa in France. I love
that they made it illegal to buy its. Yeah, don't
try it. So one of the things I wanted to
understand was why the Mona Lisa ended up in France.
And apparently Leonardo had started painting Lisa in Italy, but
(27:29):
when his patron, the Medici, the brother of Pope Leo
the ten, died, he wasn't getting commissions in Italy. So
you know, the French were very welcoming. They praised his genius,
so he moves there. But some of the first damage
to the Mona Lisa actually happened early on. It happened
when King Francis the First owned the painting. He hung
it in his bathing suite where the steam actually dulled
(27:52):
the color, and when a restorer tried to preserve the
color by putting the lacquer on it, he permanently dulled it.
All right, Well here's one to close it out, mango.
Did you know that there is a scientist who claims
to have figured out what the Mona Lisa actually sounded like.
This was part of a promotion for the Japanese version
of The da Vinci Code. Montsumi Suzuki used the measurement
(28:14):
from the painting's face and hands to figure out how
big her skull would have been, also to determine her
height about five foot six inches. Then they used data
simulation to recreate the vocal cords to figure out her
pitch and apparently the voice is somewhat deep. Now, we
also figured out what Leonardo da Vinci's voice sounded like,
and apparently it was super nasal. I love that. Yeah,
(28:39):
I do wonder if knowing that da Vinci was nasal helps,
you know, help sell tickets for the movie. But whatever
the case, the fact is so good it makes me
want to give you this week's trophy. And also I'm
thinking we should stop the fact off just to get
Dylan some rogaine for his eyebrows, because totally went above
and beyond. I mean, he just tries so hard that Dylan.
(29:01):
All right, Well, that's it for this week's Part Time Genius.
To remember. If you want to tell us anything about
the show, If you want to ask us questions, send
in your own poems about the Mona Lisa, just email
our mothers at PT genius Moms at gmail dot com.
That's the letter, p the letter T Genius Moms at
gmail dot com. They'll make sure we get the message. Meng.
(29:23):
I don't know if you knew we created this email address,
but it's it's pretty amazing, so send us notes here.
That's right, Thank you so much for listening. Part Time
(29:44):
Genius is a production of Kaleidoscope and iHeartRadio. This show
is hosted by Will Pearson and me Mongaetikler and research
by our goodpal Mary Philip Sandy. Today's episode was engineered
and produced by the wonderful Dylan Fagan, with a from
Tyler Klang. The show is executive produced for iHeart by
Katrina Norvel and Ali Perry, with social media support from
(30:08):
Sasha Gay, Trustee Dara Potts and Viny Shorey. For more
podcasts from Kaleidoscope and iHeartRadio. Visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
You're listening to Part Time Genius, the production of Kaleidoscope
and iHeartRadio. Guess what will? What's that? Mango? So I'm
trying to write a poem for the Mona Lisa and
I need little help. Rhyme Zone says there's no perfect
rhyme for Mona Lisa. So what do you think rhyme's best?
(00:24):
Like amnesia anesthesia or moesha? Wait, Mango? First of all,
why are you writing Mona Lisa poem? Because even though
there are over a million pieces of art in the Louver,
the Mona Lisa is the only one who actually receives
her own mail, and people have been writing to the
Mona Lisa since the nineteenth century. She even has her
(00:45):
own mailbox because the painting is so enchanting. So I'm curious, So, like,
what what do people actually write? Some of the letters
express how moved people are by the artwork, and some
ask the smirking Beauty for advice, and some of the
letters actually include marriage proposals. It is pretty incredible. I
love that people have a parasocial relationship with a piece
(01:06):
of art. I think it's the first time I've heard
about this. Yeah, and it used to be. For years
you actually have to make a trip to the Louver
to pass along your fan mail tour. But these days
you can actually post a letter to the museid Louver
service de public all attention dey Mona Lisa, which I've
obviously said in a perfect franch accent. You nailed it, Mango,
(01:26):
So I figure, why not add to the file. Well,
in that case, maybe try rhyming Mona Lisa with milk
of Magnesia, Mango. That's where you would have an answer
for me. So why don't we put the poetry aside
for a moment and dive into today's episode, which is
all about the Mona Lisa. Hey, their podcast listeners, I'm
(02:04):
Will Pearson and as always I'm here with my good
friend Mango and sitting behind that big booth that's our
powd Dylan. Now, Mango, I know I got here a
little bit before you did, but Dylan was already here.
I think he had clocked in a good half hour
before I even sat down, and he's been holding that
weird smile Mona Lisa's style for the last hour. Now.
(02:24):
It's really impressive. Yeah, it's weird, but it's also really captivating.
It's also crazy that he shaved his eyebrows. I mean,
it's just spot on to the Mona Lisa. But that's
just the links to Dylan goes to for these bits.
It's truly impressive. Anyway, mego, let's dive in here. So
what is it about the Mona Lisa that is so captivating? Like?
(02:46):
Why do people stand in lines to get into the
louver just so they can stand in this huge crowd
and try to see this painting? Is it just her
smile or like what is it? Yeah? So obviously it's
not just the smile. First of all, it's a super
good painting, which I believe is a direct quote from
our forum. Yeah, I think, I think, I think I
(03:06):
remember seeing that quote. But what makes the painting so unique? Well,
to start with, most sixteenth century portraits of nobility showed
off their social status and their wealth with a lot
of like flamboyant clothing. So the painting's also played up
hair styles and accessories. But you know, if you've seen
the Mona Lisa, which is believed to be this Italian
noble Lisa del Giacondo, it's unique because she's dressed really simply,
(03:30):
all of which draws most of the attention straight to
her face and that weird smile. Yeah, but there's also
other stuff, right, So, typical Italian portraiture used full figure poses,
but Mona Lisa is painted in this revolutionary three fourths
length pose. Also, she's not stoic or demure, which would
be typical of a female portrait. She's she's turning slightly
(03:51):
toward the viewer and she meets our eyes directly like
a man typically would, or a man at the time.
And mod Lisa also showcases some very vinci techniques. What
would those be? Yeah? What is this technique called sfumtu,
which means vanished or evaporated. Basically, Leonardo would create these
imperceptible transitions between light and dark by shading the colors
(04:15):
really gradually so that the background fades into the distance.
It's almost like adding a blur filter. And it's another
deviation from traditional Italian portraiture of the time, which would
paint the backgrounds in this same sharp focus as the
central figure. Actually, is this fuma to also a drink. Yeah,
it's in a marrow, which makes sense because if you
(04:36):
drink enough smatu, things are going to get faded into
the background. Yeah, I just want to say it's Fu
Matu over and over. But this is all cool. But
I do think we should get back to the Mona
Lisa's weird smile. I know I keep bringing it up,
but I feel like we have to talk about it. Yeah,
it's the smile that launched a mediocre two thousand and
three movie emego. It's sixty percent on Rotten Tomato, so
(04:59):
I would say, I don't sleep on it. So I
was up. I just, you know, I like to know
what it gets on rotten tomatoes. But I also looked
into Mona Lisa's smile and it's amazing. Like the preoccupation
with the painting smile dates back to the Renaissance writer
and historian Giorgio Vasari, and he actually said, in this
work of Leonardo, there was a smile so pleasing that
(05:22):
it was a thing more divine than human to behold,
and it was held to be something marvelous in that
it was alive, which sounds spooky. Sounds spooky. But he
also wasn't the only one that was so captivated here.
So the treacherous attraction of Moasa's smile is said to
have consumed French artist Luke Maspero too. According to popular myth,
(05:45):
Maspero allegedly ended his life over it. We actually leapt
from the I know it's crazy, actually leapt from the
fourth story window of his Paris hotel room, and in
the note he left behind, he wrote, for years, I
have grappled desperately her smile. I prefer to die. That's
so dramatic, you know, you know, why would a smile
(06:08):
and a painting drive someone so crazy? It it feels ludicrous. Well,
you know what, there's actually some science here, like, there
are explanations for it. Some people who look at the
painting think she's not smiling at all, and that's because
the human eye uses two types of vision. There's fobial
and there's peripheral. Now, fobial or direct vision is excellent
(06:29):
at picking up detail, but is less suited to picking
up things like shadows, and so, according to Margaret Livingstone,
a professor at Harvard Quote, the elusive quality of the
Mona Lisa smile can be explained by the fact that
her smile is almost entirely in low spatial frequencies and
so is seen best by your peripheral vision. It's almost
(06:50):
like an optical illusion, like the more a person stares
straight ahead, the less their peripheral vision actually works. Oh
that's really cool. So I'm at the I'm staring at
the Mona Lisa because I want to take it all
in and get my money's worth. But the harder I stare,
the harder it is for my vision to register that smile.
That's exactly right. And it's only when you start looking
(07:11):
at other parts of the painting, like the background or
hands or the chair, that's when your eyes really pick
up on the smile, which could sort of strike you
as alive, right because it's not there, and it suddenly
appears like Mona Lisa is finally deigned to smile at you,
the sweaty jet lag tourists who's come all the way
to friends to see her. I mean, that's the theory, Mango.
(07:33):
You know what's funny is that I'm really glad you
mentioned the chair. Wait, chair, What did I say about
the chair? I don't think I said anything about the chair,
did I Just that it exists? It trikes out chair.
The chair is one of the most interesting parts of
the Mona Lisa, and one that art historians actually focus
on specifically, it's a Pozetto chair, which means little well,
(07:55):
which some historians believe is a reference to the amphibious
nature of Mona Lisa. She's surrounded by water, She's wearing
this green dress, and if you know she's sitting on
a little well, you can imagine the rivers behind her
are flowing into her. Mm hmm. It's obviously a rich
and surprising and ingeniously conceived work of art. But here's
what I've always been stuck on with the Mona Lisa.
(08:16):
Like the Renaissance had I don't know if you know this,
but a lot of really super good paintings Mago, which
also sounds like a quote from Art Forum straight from it.
But seriously, I've always wondered what made the Mona Lisa
stick out amongst all this amazing art, And through our research,
I finally found the answer, Mango. It's the vibes. Vibes, yeah, yeah, well,
(08:38):
the vibes and incredible marketing, like the Mona Lisa is
like the Jeremy Allen White of Renaissance paintings. I don't
even know what that means. All right, well, hear me
out on this. So even before it was in the loop,
the Mona Lisa started out hot like it had this
great pedigree. It was in the royal collection of the
literal King of France, Francis the First, and who's court
(08:59):
Leonardo spent the last years of his life. The painting
was there for centuries until the French Revolution claimed the
royal collection as the property of the people. Then Napoleon
took it and placed it in his bedroom because he
loved it that much, and then finally it landed in
the Louver. Sure, so there's like a lot of history
there of being owned by important people. But it was
(09:21):
also the heat around Leonardo da Vinci that helped grow
interest in the Mona Lisa, because something happened in the
nineteenth century where Leonardo became more popular, you know, see
not only as a very good painter, but also as
a great scientist and inventor of course, and many of
his so called inventions were later debunked, and his contributions
to science and architecture came to be seen as you know,
(09:43):
less than they might have been at first. But this
idea of Leonardo as a genius has continued well into
the twenty first century, and that of course has contributed
to the Mona Lisa's popularity. But then there was Marcel
Duchamp's contribution to the painting. So you're talking about Deschamp.
The data is too, you know, made all that fun
crazy art, like signed that urinal and entered it into
(10:04):
an art exhibition. Back guy, Yeah, very same guy. So
Duchamp took a postcard reproduction of the Mona Lisa. This
was back in nineteen nineteen. He drew a beard and
mustache on it. It was like this playful depiction. It
was meant to be in irreverent commentary about the worship
of art. But he also wrote lhoo q across the
(10:25):
bottom of the postcard, which sounds like, look right, is
that us? What was I mean? Exactly? Well, it's a
vulgar phrase for I guess you could say she's hot,
But the polite translation is there is fire down below,
got it? You've never written that on anything anyway. The
(10:47):
depiction of the Mona Lisa became a huge thing to
deface of this revered work of art as commentary, and
before a long other artists followed suit and distorted disfigure.
They played with rep reductions of the Mona Lisa, including
Andy Warhol. Actually, over decades, as technology improved, the painting
was endlessly reproduced, sometimes manipulated, sometimes not, and so her
(11:11):
face became one of the most well known in the world,
even to people who don't really care about art. Right, so,
I may have never been to the Loof or never
even heard of Leo da Vinci, But by the twentieth century,
even if I hate art, it's hard to avoid the
Mona Lisa's presence. That's exactly right. In fact, in the
nineteen sixties and seventies, the Mona Lisa was so famous
(11:32):
she went on tour. She traveled to the US and
a first class cabin on an ocean liner drew about
forty thousand people a day to the Metropolitan Museum in
New York City and then in the National Gallery of
Art in Washington, DC, and then after that she went
on to Japan. And of course the popularity was only
increased by that heist too, Right, wait, there was a heist.
(11:54):
It is really really fun, But why don't we take
a quick break before we get to that. Welcome back
(12:14):
to Part Time Genius, where we're discussing the Mona Lisa
and Mango. You were just telling us about an art
theft involving da Vinci's most famous painting. Is that right?
That's right. So in nineteen eleven, the Mona Lisa had
made it to the Louver, a huge museum in Paris,
literally huge like. At the time, the Louver was the
largest building in the world, with more than a thousand
(12:35):
rooms spread out over forty five acres. Can you believe,
Oh my gosh, that's ridiculous. So what is the heating
bill on a place like that? Can you imagine? Nothing?
Because it's France, so it's just cold, all right, A
good point, that's fair. Anyways, it was a quiet Monday
morning in Paris on the twenty first of August nineteen eleven,
and three men were hurrying out of the Louver, which
(12:56):
is odd so that the museum was closed to visitors
on Mondays. The men were Vincenzo Perusia and the brothers,
Vincenzo and Michelle Lancelotti. They're these young Italian handymen. They
had come to the Louver on Sunday afternoon, hidden overnight
in a storeroom near the Salon care A gallery of
Renaissance paintings, and then in the morning wearing white workmen's smocks,
(13:19):
they went into the salon and seized a small painting
off the wall. They ripped off the glass, shadow box
and frame, and then they went to a stairwell and
Perusia hid the painting under his clothes, and then they
slipped out of the gallery down a back stairwell, threw
a side entrance and onto the streets of Paris. And
so they stole the Mona Lisa. Yeah, they stole the
Mona Lisa. It took twenty six hours before the louver
(13:42):
staff even noticed that it was missing. You have to
remember how big the louver is, right, and in nineteen
eleven there were fewer than one hundred and fifty guards
looking out for all of that art. I'm curious, So, like,
how did they plan it and why did they steal it? Like,
give me the Ocean's ta plot here mango before in
nineteen ten, a letter was mailed to the louver from
(14:02):
Vienna which threatened the Mona Lisa. So museum officials hired
a firm named Kobie to put a dozen of its
most prized paintings under glass, and the work took three months,
and one of the men assigned to the project was
Vincenzo Perusia who was one of the thieves, and Prusia
was this Italian worker on a French construction crew, so
(14:23):
they teased him a lot. Prusia later testified in court
that they quote almost always called me Manja Macaroni or
Macaroni eater, and very often they stole my personal property
and salted my wine. So he was getting at this
French crew. Yeah, and you took it personally. And some
(14:44):
accounts say Prusa was motivated by national pride and he
wanted to repatriate Mona Lisa to Italy. Anyway, there there
was this media explosion when the Louver announced the theft.
Newspaper headlines were all over the place, you know, wanted
posters for the painting were hung on Parisian walls, and
crowds masked at police headquarters. And when the Louver actually
(15:05):
reopened after a week, thousands of spectators, including Franz Kafka,
flooded into the salon to stare at the empty wall
where the Mona Lisa had once been. An empty people
are so weird, like why would people line up to
stare at a blank wall? I mean the grief was remarkable, right,
like the national outpouring. According to historians, mimicked the shock
(15:28):
of Princess Diana's death and where was the actual painting
being kept during all of this? So Prussia had squirreled
the Mona Lisa away in this false bottom of the
wooden trunk in his room at a boardinghouse. And when
the Parisian police interrogated him as part of all their interviews,
because they basically interviewed everyone who was working at the
louver at the time, he said he only learned about
(15:48):
the theft from the newspapers and that the reason he
was late to work that Monday in August was that
he had drunk too much the night before and overslept.
But Prusia ultimately wanted money for this world famous painting,
so he twenty eight months and then in December nineteen thirteen,
he left that boarding house with the trunk and he
took a train to Florence, where he tried to offload
the painting to an art dealer, who promptly called the police.
(16:12):
He then had a brief trial in Florence, pleaded guilty,
and ended up serving just eight months in prison. I mean,
I guess it's a fairly happy ending of the story, then, yeah,
and the painting actually went on tour in Italy briefly
before it got sent back to France. But the theft
made the Mona Lisa a global icon. In the first
two days after it was rehung in the Louvers Salon,
(16:33):
more than one hundred thousand people viewed it, and today
eight million people see the Mona Lisa every single year. Wow,
it does feel like Prusia should have gotten like this
pr fee or something like that for boosting the Mona
Lisa's profile. Yeah, but weirdly, you know, there are actually
some conspiracy theories. So some said that theft was the
French government's way of trying to distract the public opinion
(16:56):
from uprisings in colonial West Africa. A few months before
the was found, the New York Times speculated that the
Louver Restores had botched a restoration job and that the
museum was just like concocting this story to cover that up.
There was also a rumor that a gang of international
art thieves had poached the painting and substituted a fake
that was in Perusia's possession when he was caught, which
(17:17):
is all kind of incredible. Whoa really. Yeah, And apparently
this Argentinian also confessed to masterminding the crime. He did
this to American reporter named Carl Decker. He basically said
he paid Perusia and the other two men to steal
the painting because the glass box that protected it weighed
two hundred pounds, so you needed a few men on
the job. And then he said he had six forgeries
(17:40):
made and sold to private collectors. So for a while
there was some question of whether the Mona Lisa and
the Louver was the real deal. And then the other
conspiracy theory around the theft was this whole you know
Picasso thing. Wait what Picasso thing? Yeah, it's kind of incredible.
So during that eighteen month period where the French police
were not arrested the dudes who actually stole the Mona Lisa,
(18:02):
they arrested Pablo Picasso and the poet and critic Guillaume Apollinaire.
It started when this guy, Joseph Gary Pierre went to
the Paris Journal and told them that for the past
several years he'd been stealing and then selling minor artwork
from the Louver, and to prove it, Pire produced a
small statue that the Louver curators confirmed with museums, and
(18:23):
the police eventually connected Piree to Apollinaire, who was a
member of Picasso's modernist entourage. They were called labond de Picasso,
and there were this like group of artistic firebrands known
around town as the wild Men of Paris. And it
wasn't really that big a stretch for the police to
assume this ring of art thieves were sophisticated enough to
(18:45):
swipe the Mona Lisa. Of course, neither Apollinaire nor Picasso
had played any part in that painting's disappearance, all right,
So Picasso and his buddies didn't steal the Mona Lisa.
They were they were innocent. Yeah. Well, the funny thing
is they weren't exactly innocent. Pierre was telling the truth
that Picasso had bought stolen statues from him and kept
(19:06):
them buried in this cupboard in his Paris apartment. And
you know, later the artist pretended ignorance, like he didn't
know they were stolen. But at the bottom of every
statue it was stamped in bold property of de Louver.
That's not a good look. Yeah, And it got weirder
because when pire got put on trial, it kind of
ended up being like this massive farce. Picasso and his
(19:30):
friends confessed to putting their stolen statues in this old
suitcase and almost throwing the bag into the sind before
realizing they couldn't destroy this incredible art. So upon Air
confesses to everything on the stand, but he also throws
in a lot of lies, and Picasso, who normally liked
to project, you know, a supermasho image, he breaks down
(19:51):
and weeps and also says a lot of nonsense, and
it all confuses the judge and he gets baffled by
the whole thing and then ultimately just dismisses the men
with a warning. But because's involvement obviously only brought the
Mona Lisa more press, that is so funny, all right, Well,
let's take a moment to talk about who the Mona
(20:11):
Lisa actually is. Like, who is this woman whose portrait
has been reproduced a ridiculous amount of times for five
hundred plus years. Yeah, it's funny because I feel like
there used to be a real mystery about who the
Mona Lisa was. That's right, But back in two thousand
and eight, a German university found conclusive evidence that it's
Lisa Gerdini del Jacondo dated notes from October fifteen oh three,
(20:35):
scribbled in the margins of a book at Heidelberg University's library.
They confirmed that Lisa del Jacondo was indeed the model
and her husband was most likely the man who commissioned
the portrait. The comments comparati Leonardo to the ancient Greek
artist at Pelis and said he was working on three
paintings at the time, one of them a portrait of
Lisa del Jacondo, which sounds pretty conclusive. Yeah, I will
(20:59):
say at c Like for almost any given fact or
assertion about the Mona Lisa, there is someone, often with
the fancy Tyler degree who disputes it, of course, like anything.
But probably the only thing everyone can agree on is
that it's rectangular. But let's go with the Lisa del
Jacondo theory for just a minute. Like, there's been this
long standing theory that Lisa was or had recently been
(21:23):
pregnant when she's set for this portrait, and in two
thousand and four, a series of three D scans essentially
confirmed this. The scans showed this fine gauzy veil around
Mona Lisa's shoulders, this garment that women of the Italian
and Renaissance were when they were expecting it's called a guamelo. Well,
couldn't we just see the veil by looking at the painting? Like,
(21:44):
why do we need three D scans of all of us?
Actually the scans have been able to tell us a
whole lot. Like for a while, there was this big
question over whether the Mona Lisa didn't have eyelashes or eyebrows,
and there was a debate over whether it was just
the fashion at the time or whether maybe leonah Ardo
never actually finished the painting. But an engineer named Pascal
(22:04):
Cote used the scans to reveal traces of the Mona
Lisa's left brow and basically that the lashes have been
obliterated both by time and this long ago restoration. Also,
the scans showed that da Vinci changed his mind about
two fingers on Lisa's left hand and how they were
going to be placed in the painting, and that her
face was originally a little bit wider and the smile
(22:26):
more prominent. So it's really actually a lot that they
can tell from these scans. That's incredible. I had no
idea you could like sort of see beneath the painting.
Call those layers. That's amazing. Yeah, it's really really cool.
But you know your question about the veil. As the
Mona Lisa aged, her veil darkened and it made it
harder to see. But with the confirmation of the veil,
(22:46):
historians were able to confirm that Francesco del ja Condo
asked for the painting of his wife to celebrate the
birth of his second son, which confirms that Mona Lisa
is his wife, Lisa del Giaconda. That's right, actually his
third wife to be exact. So in fourteen ninety five,
at the age of fifteen, Lisa Garadini married prosperous silk
(23:07):
and cloth merchant Francisco di Bartolomeo Diza Nobi del Jacondo.
It's a mouthful there, but that's a pretty awesome name.
Lisa and Francesco ended up having five children, Piero, Camilla,
Andrea Jacondo and Marietta. So that's the Lisa in the
Mona Lisa allegedly. Don't tell me you're getting into conspiracy talk,
(23:30):
care mango, Well, I want to end this episode on
a crazy note. So did you know that some people
believe there are two Mona Lisas. Oh, Basically, there's this
painting that looks a lot like the Mona Lisa. It's
a painting of a younger woman, kind of like a fresher,
younger Mona Lisa, with dark hair and an enigmatic smile
that sits at a slight angle in front of a
(23:52):
panoramic landscape, which obviously sounds familiar. It's called the Aleworth
Mona Lisa, and long story short, it got passed around
different art collectors over the centuries, including American collector Henry F. Pulitzer.
Pulitzer published a book arguing that the Aleworth picture was
in fact Leonardo's only real portrait of Mona Lisa. The
(24:12):
way did Leonardo actually paint this one? I mean, some
people think so, namely the Mona Lisa Foundation, who have
a vested interest in, you know, furthering this theory, but
most art scholars don't believe. So it's painted on canvas,
and Leonardo usually painted on wood, and they basically say
that it's just not good enough to be by Leonardo
(24:34):
da Vinci. It's just like a bad copy of the
Mona Lisa. But speaking of bad copy, what do you
say we get into the fact of wow? I like
what you did there, manga, Let's do it all right. So,
one of the strangest things about the Mona Lisa is
(24:56):
that it's been attacked. A bunch in nineteen fifty six
threw a rock at it, which chipped the subject's left elbow.
Over the years, people have thrown acid on it, They've
tried to face it with spray paint, They've thrown a
mug at it, and weirdest of all, it had a
cake thrown in its face as recently as twenty twenty two.
That is so weird and disheartening, you know. According to
(25:20):
a book by Diane Hales, over the years, the Mona
Lisa has launched a number of fashion trends, and this
is what she writes. Quote Society women adopted the Mona
Lisa's look by dusting yellow powder on their faces and
necks to suggest her golden complexion, and immobilizing their facial
muscles to mimic her smile, which sounds like an early
(25:40):
imitation of botox. Also quote. In Parisian cabarets, dancers dressed
as Laja Conde, the French name for Mona Lisa, and
performed a saucy can can all right, that's pretty good.
All right, Well, did you know, in trying to figure
out who the Mona Lisa was, scientists have actually dug
up bones beneath a convent in Florence. Apparently one of
(26:02):
Lisa's daughters became a nun and in her old age
she moved into the convent with her daughter. So scientists
went digging beneath this chapel. They found bones that do
match up timeline wise with Lisa's death, but they were
hoping to use digital imaging on the skeleton to compare
it to the painting. But apparently there was no skull
found with the bones, and that means her face couldn't
(26:24):
actually be digitally reconstructed. So here's a fun one. To
keep his subject smiling or half smiling, Da Vinci had
a whole bag of tricks. He apparently employed six musicians
to perform for her, had people reading stories out loud
to her, and also had a fluffy white cat and
a greyhound dog for her to play with on set.
(26:45):
All right, will people often speculate how much the Mona
Lisa is worse. Back in nineteen sixty two, when the
painting went on tour, the price was placed at about
one hundred million dollars, which is around eight hundred and
thirty four million dollars in today's currency, but others estimated
it's actually worth more. One Entre Dour placed it in
the billions of dollars because of its value to France
(27:08):
and the amount of tourism the painting generates. Of course,
all of that is actually mood because it's illegal to
buy or sell the Mona Lisa in France. I love
that they made it illegal to buy its. Yeah, don't
try it. So one of the things I wanted to
understand was why the Mona Lisa ended up in France.
And apparently Leonardo had started painting Lisa in Italy, but
(27:29):
when his patron, the Medici, the brother of Pope Leo
the ten, died, he wasn't getting commissions in Italy. So
you know, the French were very welcoming. They praised his genius,
so he moves there. But some of the first damage
to the Mona Lisa actually happened early on. It happened
when King Francis the First owned the painting. He hung
it in his bathing suite where the steam actually dulled
(27:52):
the color, and when a restorer tried to preserve the
color by putting the lacquer on it, he permanently dulled it.
All right, Well here's one to close it out, mango.
Did you know that there is a scientist who claims
to have figured out what the Mona Lisa actually sounded like.
This was part of a promotion for the Japanese version
of The da Vinci Code. Montsumi Suzuki used the measurement
(28:14):
from the painting's face and hands to figure out how
big her skull would have been, also to determine her
height about five foot six inches. Then they used data
simulation to recreate the vocal cords to figure out her
pitch and apparently the voice is somewhat deep. Now, we
also figured out what Leonardo da Vinci's voice sounded like,
and apparently it was super nasal. I love that. Yeah,
(28:39):
I do wonder if knowing that da Vinci was nasal helps,
you know, help sell tickets for the movie. But whatever
the case, the fact is so good it makes me
want to give you this week's trophy. And also I'm
thinking we should stop the fact off just to get
Dylan some rogaine for his eyebrows, because totally went above
and beyond. I mean, he just tries so hard that Dylan.
(29:01):
All right, Well, that's it for this week's Part Time Genius.
To remember. If you want to tell us anything about
the show, If you want to ask us questions, send
in your own poems about the Mona Lisa, just email
our mothers at PT genius Moms at gmail dot com.
That's the letter, p the letter T Genius Moms at
gmail dot com. They'll make sure we get the message. Meng.
(29:23):
I don't know if you knew we created this email address,
but it's it's pretty amazing, so send us notes here.
That's right, Thank you so much for listening. Part Time
(29:44):
Genius is a production of Kaleidoscope and iHeartRadio. This show
is hosted by Will Pearson and me Mongaetikler and research
by our goodpal Mary Philip Sandy. Today's episode was engineered
and produced by the wonderful Dylan Fagan, with a from
Tyler Klang. The show is executive produced for iHeart by
Katrina Norvel and Ali Perry, with social media support from
(30:08):
Sasha Gay, Trustee Dara Potts and Viny Shorey. For more
podcasts from Kaleidoscope and iHeartRadio. Visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Part-Time Genius News
Host
Will and Mango
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