September 19, 2025 • 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? Today, Will and Mango go deep on the mysterious beauty and discover what—and who!—is behind that sly smile.
This episode originally aired on May 30, 2024.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:03):
You're listening to Part Time Genius, the production of Kaleidoscope
and iHeartRadio. Guess what will?
Speaker 2 (00:13):
What's that?
Speaker 1 (00:13):
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? Like amnesia anesthesia or moesha? Wait, Mango?
Speaker 2 (00:29):
First of all, why are you writing Mona Lisa poem?
Speaker 1 (00:32):
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 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
(00:53):
people are by the artwork, and some ask the smirking
Beauty for advice, and some of the letters actually include
marriage proposals.
Speaker 2 (01:02):
It is pretty incredible. I love that people have a
parasocial relationship with a piece of art. I think it's
the first time I've heard about this.
Speaker 1 (01:08):
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 Attention day Mona Lisa, which I've obviously said in
a perfect franch accent, and you nailed it, Mango, So
I figure, why not add to the file.
Speaker 2 (01:29):
Well, in that case, maybe try rhyming Mona Lisa with
milk of Magnesia, Mango.
Speaker 1 (01:33):
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.
Speaker 2 (02:01):
Hey, their podcast listeners. I'm 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
(02:23):
for the last hour.
Speaker 1 (02:24):
Now.
Speaker 2 (02:24):
It's really impressive.
Speaker 1 (02:26):
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?
Speaker 2 (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?
Speaker 1 (02:56):
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.
Speaker 2 (03:05):
Yeah, I think, I think, I think I remember seeing
that quote. But what makes the painting so unique? Well,
to start with, most sixteenth.
Speaker 1 (03:12):
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, all of which draws
most of the attention straight to her face and that
(03:34):
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 toward the viewer
and she meets our eyes directly like a man typically would,
(03:56):
or a man at the time. And Modalsa also showcases
some very vincy 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 really gradually so that the background
(04:17):
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 drink enough smatu, things are going to
(04:38):
get faded into the background.
Speaker 2 (04:41):
Yeah, I just want to say sfumatu 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.
Speaker 1 (04:52):
Yeah, it's the smile that launched a mediocre two thousand
and three movie Emego.
Speaker 2 (04:56):
It's sixty percent on rotten Tomato, so I would say,
I don't sleep on it.
Speaker 1 (05:01):
So I was up.
Speaker 2 (05:03):
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 it was a
thing more divine than human to behold, and it was
(05:26):
held to be something marvelous in that it was alive,
which sounds spooky. It sounds spooky, But he also wasn't
the only one that was so captivated here. So the
treacherous attraction of Moasia's smile is said to have consumed
French artist Luke Maspero too. According to popular myth, Maspero
allegedly ended his life over it. We actually leapt from
(05:49):
the I know it's crazy. He 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 with her smile. I prefer to die.
Speaker 1 (06:03):
That's so dramatic, you know, you know, why would a
smile and a painting drive someone so crazy? It it
feels ludicrous.
Speaker 2 (06:12):
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 at picking up detail, but is less suited to
picking up things like shadows, and so, according to Margaret Livingstone,
(06:36):
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
like an optical illusion, like the more a person stares
straight ahead, the less their peripheral vision actually works.
Speaker 1 (06:57):
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.
Speaker 2 (07:08):
That's exactly right. And it's only when you start looking
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
(07:29):
to friends to see her. I mean, that's the theory, Mango.
Speaker 1 (07:33):
You know what's funny is that I'm really glad you
mentioned the chair. Wait, chair?
Speaker 2 (07:38):
What did I say about the chair? I don't think
I said anything about the chair, did I.
Speaker 1 (07:41):
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, 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
(08:02):
if you know she's sitting on a little well, you
could imagine the rivers behind her are flowing into her.
Mm hmm.
Speaker 2 (08:08):
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. Like the Renaissance had I don't
know if you know this, but a lot of really
super good paintings mego, which.
Speaker 1 (08:22):
Also sounds like a quote from Art Forum.
Speaker 2 (08:24):
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.
Speaker 1 (08:36):
Vibes, Yeah, yeah, well, 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.
Speaker 2 (08:46):
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 I, and who's court 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
(09:07):
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 also the heat around Leonardo
dventually that helped grow interest in the Mona Lisa, because
something happened in the nineteenth century where Leonardo became more popular,
(09:30):
you know, see, not only as a very good painter,
but also as a great scientist an 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, 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
(09:50):
of course has contributed to the Mona Lisa's popularity. But
then there was Marcel Duchamp's contribution to the painting.
Speaker 1 (09:57):
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 an art exhibition.
Speaker 2 (10:06):
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 bottom of the postcard.
Speaker 1 (10:27):
Which sounds like, look right, is that? What's I mean? Exactly?
Speaker 2 (10:32):
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.
Speaker 1 (10:46):
Anyway.
Speaker 2 (10:47):
The 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.
Speaker 1 (11:16):
Right, so, I may have never been to the Louver
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.
Speaker 2 (11:27):
That's exactly right. In fact, in the nineteen sixties and seventies,
the Mona Lisa was so famous she went on tour.
She traveled to the US and a first class cabin
on an ocean liner threw about forty thousand people a
day to the Metropolitan Museum in New York City and
then in the National Gallery of Art in Washington, d C.
And then after that she went on to Japan.
Speaker 1 (11:48):
And of course the popularity was only increased by that
heist too, right, wait, there was a heist. It is
really really fun, But why don't we take a quick
break before we get to that.
Speaker 2 (12:14):
Welcome back 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.
Speaker 1 (12:22):
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 rooms spread out over forty five acres.
Speaker 2 (12:38):
Can you believe, Oh my gosh, that's ridiculous. So what
is the heating bill on a place like that? Can
you imagine?
Speaker 1 (12:43):
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 is odd 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
(13:08):
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,
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
(13:30):
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
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.
Speaker 2 (13:52):
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.
Speaker 1 (14:00):
Before in nineteen ten, a letter was mailed to the
louver from 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 Prussia was this Italian worker on a French
(14:22):
construction crew, so 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 bull at this French crew. Yeah, and you took
(14:43):
it personally. And some accounts say Prusia 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 Regian walls,
and crowds masked at police headquarters. And when the Louver
(15:04):
actually 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 Prusia had squirreled
the Mona Lisa away in this false bottom of a
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 that 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.
Speaker 2 (16:39):
Wow, it does feel like Prusia should have gotten like
this pr fee or something like that for boosting the
Mona Lisa's profile.
Speaker 1 (16:46):
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 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
(17:07):
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 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
(17:29):
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 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.
Speaker 2 (17:52):
Wait what Picasso thing?
Speaker 1 (17:54):
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, 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,
(18:17):
and to prove it, Pire produced a small statue that
the Louver curators confirmed with museums, and 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
(18:37):
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 swipe the
Mona Lisa. Of course, neither Apollinaire nor Picasso had played
any part in that painting's disappearance.
Speaker 2 (18:52):
All right, So Picasso and his buddies didn't steal the
Mona Lisa. They were innocent.
Speaker 1 (18:57):
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 them buried in this cupboard
in his Paris apartment, and you know, later the hardest
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.
Speaker 2 (19:18):
That's not a good look.
Speaker 1 (19:20):
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 friends confessed to putting their
stolen statues in this old suitcase and almost throwing the
bag into the Seine before realizing they couldn't destroy this
incredible art. So upon Air confesses to everything on the stand,
(19:43):
but he also throws in a lot of lies, and Picasso,
who normally liked to project, you know, a supermasho image,
he breaks down 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
(20:04):
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 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.
Speaker 2 (20:24):
That's right, But back in two thousand and eight at
German University found conclusive evidence that it's Lisa Gherdini del
ja Condo dated notes from October fifteen oh three, 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
(20:45):
the portrait. The comments comparare 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.
Speaker 1 (20:56):
Which sounds pretty conclusive.
Speaker 2 (20:58):
Yeah, I will 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
(21:22):
recently been 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
(21:43):
by looking at the painting? Like, 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 leoni Ardo never actually
finished the painting. But an engineer named Pascal Cote used
(22:05):
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 more prominent.
(22:27):
So it's really actually a lot that they can tell
from these scans. That's incredible.
Speaker 1 (22:31):
I had no idea you could like sort of see
beneath the painting to all those layers, that's amazing.
Speaker 2 (22:35):
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, historians were able to confirm
that Francesco del Jacondo asked for the painting of his
wife to celebrate the birth of his second.
Speaker 1 (22:54):
Son, which confirms that Mona Lisa is his wife, Lisa
del Giaconda.
Speaker 2 (22:59):
That's right, actually his third wife to be exact. So
in fourteen ninety five, at the age of fifteen, Lisa
Gardini married prosperous silk and cloth merchant Francisco di Bartolomeo
di Zenobi del Jacondo. It's a mouthful there, but it's
a pretty awesome name. Lisa and Francesco ended up having
five children, Piero, Camilla, Andrea Jacondo and Marietta. So that's
(23:24):
the Lisa in the Mona Lisa allegedly. Don't tell me
you're getting into conspiracy talk here, Mango.
Speaker 1 (23:31):
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, who Basically, there's this painting that
looks a lot like the Mona Lisa. It's a painting
of a younger woman, kind of like uh fresher, younger
Mona Lisa, with dark hair and an enigmatic smile that
sits at a slight angle in front of a panoramic landscape,
(23:53):
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
way did Leonardo actually paint this one? I mean, some
(24:16):
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
da Vinci. It's just like a bad copy of the
(24:37):
Mona Lisa. But speaking of bad copy, what do you
say we get into the fact of.
Speaker 2 (24:43):
Aw I like what you did there, manga, Let's do it.
Speaker 1 (24:53):
All right. So, one of the strangest things about the
Mona Lisa is 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
(25:13):
as twenty twenty two. That is so weird and disheartening,
you know. According to 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,
(25:35):
and immobilizing their facial muscles to mimic her smile, which
sounds like an early 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.
Speaker 2 (25:51):
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 the convent in Florence.
Apparently one of 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
(26:12):
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 actually be digitally reconstructed.
Speaker 1 (26:27):
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. All right, will people often
speculate how much the Mona Lisa is worse. Back in
(26:50):
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 and the amount of tourism
the painting generates. Of course, all of that is actually
(27:12):
mood because it's illegal to buy or sell the Mona
Lisa in France. I love that they made it illegal
to to buy its.
Speaker 2 (27:19):
Yeah, don't try it.
Speaker 1 (27:21):
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 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
(27:43):
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 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
(28:05):
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 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
(28:27):
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, I do
wonder if knowing that da Vinci was nasal helps, you know,
help sell tickets for the movie. But whatever the case,
(28:47):
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 they went above and beyond.
Speaker 2 (28:58):
I mean, he just tries so hard that Dylan. 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.
Speaker 1 (29:17):
Genius Moms at gmail dot com. They'll make sure we
get the message. Mang.
Speaker 2 (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.
Speaker 1 (29:44):
Part Time Genius is a production of Kaleidoscope and iHeartRadio.
This show is hosted by Will Pearson and me Mongastikler
and research by our goodpal Mary Philip Sandy. Today's episode
was engineered and produced by the wonderful Dylan Fagan. What's
the from Tyler Klang. The show is executive produced for
iHeart by Katrina Norvel and Ali Perry, with social media
(30:07):
support from Sasha Gay, trustee Dara Potts and Viney 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?
Speaker 2 (00:13):
What's that?
Speaker 1 (00:13):
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? Like amnesia anesthesia or moesha? Wait, Mango?
Speaker 2 (00:29):
First of all, why are you writing Mona Lisa poem?
Speaker 1 (00:32):
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 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
(00:53):
people are by the artwork, and some ask the smirking
Beauty for advice, and some of the letters actually include
marriage proposals.
Speaker 2 (01:02):
It is pretty incredible. I love that people have a
parasocial relationship with a piece of art. I think it's
the first time I've heard about this.
Speaker 1 (01:08):
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 Attention day Mona Lisa, which I've obviously said in
a perfect franch accent, and you nailed it, Mango, So
I figure, why not add to the file.
Speaker 2 (01:29):
Well, in that case, maybe try rhyming Mona Lisa with
milk of Magnesia, Mango.
Speaker 1 (01:33):
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.
Speaker 2 (02:01):
Hey, their podcast listeners. I'm 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
(02:23):
for the last hour.
Speaker 1 (02:24):
Now.
Speaker 2 (02:24):
It's really impressive.
Speaker 1 (02:26):
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?
Speaker 2 (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?
Speaker 1 (02:56):
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.
Speaker 2 (03:05):
Yeah, I think, I think, I think I remember seeing
that quote. But what makes the painting so unique? Well,
to start with, most sixteenth.
Speaker 1 (03:12):
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, all of which draws
most of the attention straight to her face and that
(03:34):
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 toward the viewer
and she meets our eyes directly like a man typically would,
(03:56):
or a man at the time. And Modalsa also showcases
some very vincy 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 really gradually so that the background
(04:17):
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 drink enough smatu, things are going to
(04:38):
get faded into the background.
Speaker 2 (04:41):
Yeah, I just want to say sfumatu 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.
Speaker 1 (04:52):
Yeah, it's the smile that launched a mediocre two thousand
and three movie Emego.
Speaker 2 (04:56):
It's sixty percent on rotten Tomato, so I would say,
I don't sleep on it.
Speaker 1 (05:01):
So I was up.
Speaker 2 (05:03):
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 it was a
thing more divine than human to behold, and it was
(05:26):
held to be something marvelous in that it was alive,
which sounds spooky. It sounds spooky, But he also wasn't
the only one that was so captivated here. So the
treacherous attraction of Moasia's smile is said to have consumed
French artist Luke Maspero too. According to popular myth, Maspero
allegedly ended his life over it. We actually leapt from
(05:49):
the I know it's crazy. He 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 with her smile. I prefer to die.
Speaker 1 (06:03):
That's so dramatic, you know, you know, why would a
smile and a painting drive someone so crazy? It it
feels ludicrous.
Speaker 2 (06:12):
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 at picking up detail, but is less suited to
picking up things like shadows, and so, according to Margaret Livingstone,
(06:36):
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
like an optical illusion, like the more a person stares
straight ahead, the less their peripheral vision actually works.
Speaker 1 (06:57):
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.
Speaker 2 (07:08):
That's exactly right. And it's only when you start looking
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
(07:29):
to friends to see her. I mean, that's the theory, Mango.
Speaker 1 (07:33):
You know what's funny is that I'm really glad you
mentioned the chair. Wait, chair?
Speaker 2 (07:38):
What did I say about the chair? I don't think
I said anything about the chair, did I.
Speaker 1 (07:41):
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, 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
(08:02):
if you know she's sitting on a little well, you
could imagine the rivers behind her are flowing into her.
Mm hmm.
Speaker 2 (08:08):
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. Like the Renaissance had I don't
know if you know this, but a lot of really
super good paintings mego, which.
Speaker 1 (08:22):
Also sounds like a quote from Art Forum.
Speaker 2 (08:24):
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.
Speaker 1 (08:36):
Vibes, Yeah, yeah, well, 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.
Speaker 2 (08:46):
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 I, and who's court 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
(09:07):
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 also the heat around Leonardo
dventually that helped grow interest in the Mona Lisa, because
something happened in the nineteenth century where Leonardo became more popular,
(09:30):
you know, see, not only as a very good painter,
but also as a great scientist an 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, 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
(09:50):
of course has contributed to the Mona Lisa's popularity. But
then there was Marcel Duchamp's contribution to the painting.
Speaker 1 (09:57):
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 an art exhibition.
Speaker 2 (10:06):
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 bottom of the postcard.
Speaker 1 (10:27):
Which sounds like, look right, is that? What's I mean? Exactly?
Speaker 2 (10:32):
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.
Speaker 1 (10:46):
Anyway.
Speaker 2 (10:47):
The 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.
Speaker 1 (11:16):
Right, so, I may have never been to the Louver
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.
Speaker 2 (11:27):
That's exactly right. In fact, in the nineteen sixties and seventies,
the Mona Lisa was so famous she went on tour.
She traveled to the US and a first class cabin
on an ocean liner threw about forty thousand people a
day to the Metropolitan Museum in New York City and
then in the National Gallery of Art in Washington, d C.
And then after that she went on to Japan.
Speaker 1 (11:48):
And of course the popularity was only increased by that
heist too, right, wait, there was a heist. It is
really really fun, But why don't we take a quick
break before we get to that.
Speaker 2 (12:14):
Welcome back 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.
Speaker 1 (12:22):
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 rooms spread out over forty five acres.
Speaker 2 (12:38):
Can you believe, Oh my gosh, that's ridiculous. So what
is the heating bill on a place like that? Can
you imagine?
Speaker 1 (12:43):
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 is odd 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
(13:08):
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,
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
(13:30):
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
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.
Speaker 2 (13:52):
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.
Speaker 1 (14:00):
Before in nineteen ten, a letter was mailed to the
louver from 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 Prussia was this Italian worker on a French
(14:22):
construction crew, so 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 bull at this French crew. Yeah, and you took
(14:43):
it personally. And some accounts say Prusia 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 Regian walls,
and crowds masked at police headquarters. And when the Louver
(15:04):
actually 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 Prusia had squirreled
the Mona Lisa away in this false bottom of a
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 that 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.
Speaker 2 (16:39):
Wow, it does feel like Prusia should have gotten like
this pr fee or something like that for boosting the
Mona Lisa's profile.
Speaker 1 (16:46):
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 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
(17:07):
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 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
(17:29):
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 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.
Speaker 2 (17:52):
Wait what Picasso thing?
Speaker 1 (17:54):
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, 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,
(18:17):
and to prove it, Pire produced a small statue that
the Louver curators confirmed with museums, and 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
(18:37):
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 swipe the
Mona Lisa. Of course, neither Apollinaire nor Picasso had played
any part in that painting's disappearance.
Speaker 2 (18:52):
All right, So Picasso and his buddies didn't steal the
Mona Lisa. They were innocent.
Speaker 1 (18:57):
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 them buried in this cupboard
in his Paris apartment, and you know, later the hardest
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.
Speaker 2 (19:18):
That's not a good look.
Speaker 1 (19:20):
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 friends confessed to putting their
stolen statues in this old suitcase and almost throwing the
bag into the Seine before realizing they couldn't destroy this
incredible art. So upon Air confesses to everything on the stand,
(19:43):
but he also throws in a lot of lies, and Picasso,
who normally liked to project, you know, a supermasho image,
he breaks down 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
(20:04):
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 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.
Speaker 2 (20:24):
That's right, But back in two thousand and eight at
German University found conclusive evidence that it's Lisa Gherdini del
ja Condo dated notes from October fifteen oh three, 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
(20:45):
the portrait. The comments comparare 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.
Speaker 1 (20:56):
Which sounds pretty conclusive.
Speaker 2 (20:58):
Yeah, I will 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
(21:22):
recently been 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
(21:43):
by looking at the painting? Like, 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 leoni Ardo never actually
finished the painting. But an engineer named Pascal Cote used
(22:05):
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 more prominent.
(22:27):
So it's really actually a lot that they can tell
from these scans. That's incredible.
Speaker 1 (22:31):
I had no idea you could like sort of see
beneath the painting to all those layers, that's amazing.
Speaker 2 (22:35):
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, historians were able to confirm
that Francesco del Jacondo asked for the painting of his
wife to celebrate the birth of his second.
Speaker 1 (22:54):
Son, which confirms that Mona Lisa is his wife, Lisa
del Giaconda.
Speaker 2 (22:59):
That's right, actually his third wife to be exact. So
in fourteen ninety five, at the age of fifteen, Lisa
Gardini married prosperous silk and cloth merchant Francisco di Bartolomeo
di Zenobi del Jacondo. It's a mouthful there, but it's
a pretty awesome name. Lisa and Francesco ended up having
five children, Piero, Camilla, Andrea Jacondo and Marietta. So that's
(23:24):
the Lisa in the Mona Lisa allegedly. Don't tell me
you're getting into conspiracy talk here, Mango.
Speaker 1 (23:31):
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, who Basically, there's this painting that
looks a lot like the Mona Lisa. It's a painting
of a younger woman, kind of like uh fresher, younger
Mona Lisa, with dark hair and an enigmatic smile that
sits at a slight angle in front of a panoramic landscape,
(23:53):
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
way did Leonardo actually paint this one? I mean, some
(24:16):
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
da Vinci. It's just like a bad copy of the
(24:37):
Mona Lisa. But speaking of bad copy, what do you
say we get into the fact of.
Speaker 2 (24:43):
Aw I like what you did there, manga, Let's do it.
Speaker 1 (24:53):
All right. So, one of the strangest things about the
Mona Lisa is 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
(25:13):
as twenty twenty two. That is so weird and disheartening,
you know. According to 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,
(25:35):
and immobilizing their facial muscles to mimic her smile, which
sounds like an early 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.
Speaker 2 (25:51):
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 the convent in Florence.
Apparently one of 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
(26:12):
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 actually be digitally reconstructed.
Speaker 1 (26:27):
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. All right, will people often
speculate how much the Mona Lisa is worse. Back in
(26:50):
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 and the amount of tourism
the painting generates. Of course, all of that is actually
(27:12):
mood because it's illegal to buy or sell the Mona
Lisa in France. I love that they made it illegal
to to buy its.
Speaker 2 (27:19):
Yeah, don't try it.
Speaker 1 (27:21):
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 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
(27:43):
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 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
(28:05):
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 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
(28:27):
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, I do
wonder if knowing that da Vinci was nasal helps, you know,
help sell tickets for the movie. But whatever the case,
(28:47):
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 they went above and beyond.
Speaker 2 (28:58):
I mean, he just tries so hard that Dylan. 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.
Speaker 1 (29:17):
Genius Moms at gmail dot com. They'll make sure we
get the message. Mang.
Speaker 2 (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.
Speaker 1 (29:44):
Part Time Genius is a production of Kaleidoscope and iHeartRadio.
This show is hosted by Will Pearson and me Mongastikler
and research by our goodpal Mary Philip Sandy. Today's episode
was engineered and produced by the wonderful Dylan Fagan. What's
the from Tyler Klang. The show is executive produced for
iHeart by Katrina Norvel and Ali Perry, with social media
(30:07):
support from Sasha Gay, trustee Dara Potts and Viney 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
Hosts And Creators
Will Pearson
Mangesh Hattikudur
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