Editor’s Note: Noah Charney is a professor who teaches the history of art crime. He is the bestselling author of The Thefts of the Mona Lisa: On Stealing the World’s Most Famous Painting, all profits from which support art crime research.
Story highlights
December 14 marks the 100th anniversary of when Mona Lisa was returned after being stolen
It was snatched by an Italian handyman who worked inside the Louvre
He had mistakenly thought that Napoleon had looted it and wanted to repatriate it
Confusion remains where Mona Lisa was kept during WWII
When the likes of George Clooney, Matt Damon, and Bill Murray come storming across film screens this winter, in the drama The Monuments Men, viewers will be immersed in the world of Nazi art theft.
The Monuments Men were a group of some three-hundred Allied officers charged with locating, protecting, and recovering art and monuments that were endangered by the fighting in World War II. They would eventually learn of Hitler’s elaborate and highly-organized plan to strip Europe of its art.
Indeed, Hitler had established a military unit solely dedicated to art and archive theft and made detailed plans to restructure the entirety of his boyhood town of Linz, Austria, into a city-wide “super museum,” containing every important artwork in the world. We have the so-called Monuments Men to thank for the salvation of tens of thousands of masterpieces, among the estimated five million cultural objects stolen during the war.
But while the film will focus on two great trophies, Jan van Eyck’s Adoration of the Mystic Lamb, and Michelangelo’s Bruges Madonna, there will be something of an elephant in the screening room. For a fascinating question remains, and one with a complicated answer: did the Nazis steal the Mona Lisa? The answer is that they thought they did.
Mona Lisa’s vanishing act
The most famous act of theft associated with the Mona Lisa took place about a century ago. December 14, 2013 marks the 100th anniversary of the return of the world’s most famous painting to public display, after it was stolen in 1911 from the world’s most famous museum. Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa was swiped from the under-secured Louvre Museum by an amateur Italian painter and handyman named Vincenzo Peruggia.
Peruggia was under the mistaken impression that the painting had been looted by Napoleon, during his Italian campaign. This was a pretty good guess, for through his art theft unit (the first military unit in history dedicated to art theft), Napoleon had made off with tens of thousands of artworks during his Italian campaign. Leonardo’s painting was not among them, however, as it had left Italy with the elderly Leonardo, when he spent his twilight years under the protection of the French king, Francois I, who legally purchased several of his paintings after his death, the Mona Lisa among them.
But Peruggia had missed the lecture on this historical detail. He saw an opportunity to repatriate the painting when the firm for which he worked as a carpenter and glazier was hired to build protective cases to cover some of the Louvre’s most famous works, ostensibly to protect them from attack, after an anarchist had slashed an Ingres painting in protest.
Peruggia found himself with a Louvre worker’s uniform, and direct contact with the Mona Lisa. On the night before August 2 1911, he hid inside a closet in the Louvre, waiting for the footfalls of the night guards to fade into the distance. In the early morning hours, he slipped out of the closet, removed the Mona Lisa from its wall in the Salon Carre of the Louvre, and retreated to a service staircase. There he took the painting out of its frame, wrapped it in a white sheet, and headed down the stairs.
There was surely a moment of great panic, when Peruggia twisted the doorknob at the foot of the stairs, and found it locked from the inside. He was prepared for an eventuality such as this, and had tools with him. He unscrewed the doorknob and slipped it into his pocket, thinking this might unlock the door, but it didn’t.
He was trapped inside the Louvre, with the world’s most famous painting tucked under his arm…and then he heard the sound of footsteps approaching. Up the stairs came a plumber, making his morning rounds. To the plumber, Peruggia looked like a Louvre worker who had accidentally been locked in overnight—not an unheard-of occurrence. He opened the door and let Peruggia out, thinking nothing of the Mona Lisa-shaped package that Peruggia carried with him.
It would be two years before the Mona Lisa was seen again. The investigation was a fiasco that resulted in the dismissal of the head of the Louvre and the head of the Paris police. International media mocked the lack of security at the Louvre – in fact, this was the first theft to spark the interest of the world media, kicking off a love affair with the elite world of high-priced art, and its theft.
Priceless loot
The most cinematic and resounding success for the Monuments Men was the salvation of the 12,000 masterpieces destined for Hitler’s planned Linz museum, which were stored in an ancient salt mine at Altaussee, in Austria, which had been converted by the Nazis into a secret stolen art warehouse.
It was supervised by a ferocious SS officer, August Eigruber, who was determined to destroy all of the art if he could not defend it against the Allies. This is where the most famous pieces were kept, including gems by Vermeer, Raphael, Rembrandt, and a who’s-who of Old Master artists. But there is some confusion as to whether the Mona Lisa was there, as well.
There are two primary source documents that attest to the Mona Lisa’s presence in the Altaussee salt mine. The report of a secret mission called Operation Ebensburg, in which four Austrian double-agents were parachuted into the alps to delay the destruction of the Altaussee mine until the Allied Third Army could arrive, stated that the double agents “saved such priceless objects as the Louvre’s Mona Lisa.”
Another document from 12 December 1945 notes that “the Mona Lisa from Paris [is included in] 80 wagons of art and cultural objects from across Europe” that were found in the mine. And yet there is no record beyond these two documents of the world’s most famous painting being part of the world’s most famous hoard of looted art. Surely that would have been noteworthy, a rescued prize as famous as Adoration of the Mystic Lamb.
Shrouded in mystery
The Louvre remained reticent about whether it had lost the Mona Lisa at all. The only documents about the painting during World War II attest to its having been crated up on August 27, 1939, and sent with other French national treasures to a series of five chateaux, for safe-keeping—theoretically just ahead of the advance of the Nazis south through France, though the invaders quickly overtook the entire country.
When archaeologists unlocked the catacombs of Rome in 1578, they unleashed a wave of religious fervor. Catholic officials disinterred skeletal remains, which they assumed to be early Christian martyrs, and had artisans reassemble them. Encrusted with gold and jewels, the skeletons then went on display in lavish shrines across Europe to convey the glory that awaited the Church's devout followers in the afterlife. But by the early 19th century their saintly authenticity came into question and, in a dramatic reversal of fortune, many of the relics were hidden from view or destroyed.
Photographer and author Paul Koudounaris gained unprecedented access to these so-called "catacomb saints" for his new book Heavenly Bodies, published by Thames and Hudson. Many had never been photographed for publication before. Revered as spiritual objects and then reviled as a source of embarrassment for the Church, their uneven history is marked by one constant: a mysterious, if unsettling, beauty. "I wanted to pursue this project to provide a new context for them," Koudounaris says, "and to look at them not as failed devotional items, but instead as fine objects of art.
Interview by William Lee Adams
CNN: What was the purpose of decorating the skeletons in gold and jewelry?
Paul Koudounaris: It provided a new and important form of propaganda: these skeletons, shipped northward and then decorated in this elaborate and opulent way, were a means to say that the greatest glory is reserved for those who remain true to the faith, and are willing to make the ultimate sacrifice in its name. In effect, the extravagant decoration of these skeletons provided a symbol of the glory that those who remained faithful to the Catholic church could expect in heaven.
CNN: Did artisans always come from the Catholic church?
PK: The people who decorated the skeletons were most commonly nuns. If not nuns, maybe monks or lay brothers affiliated with a local religious organization. Only when something special was needed—for cases in which it was desired to decorate the skeleton with a silver suit of armor, for instance, as was sometimes done—did they contract with secular artisans.
Nuns in particular were a perfect choice for decorating skeletons like this. They were frequently involved in textile work, lace work, and beading, which they practiced on a very high level. These are what we might consider craft arts, but the exact kind of skills that were necessary for decorating a skeleton in this way.
CNN: Did the artisans ever leave offerings with the skeletons?
PK: It was definitely an honor to work on such skeletons, since it was a service to God. It is notable that many of the skeletons have rings on their bony fingers—often these rings were given to them by the very people who decorated them, as a way of leaving a lasting offering with the skeleton they had worked on, because it was a privilege to have been part of such a project.
CNN: Was there any significance attached to the specific jewels chosen to adorn the skeletons?
PK: Not really. There was not necessarily a meaning to the use of say, an amethyst or a pearl rather than something other, but as a whole the elaborate and opulent décor symbolized the idea of heavenly glory. It symbolized the glory which God saves for those who serve him. So the significance of the décor was to remind those within the local congregation of the glory that would await them in heaven if they remained true to the church, and made whatever sacrifices they could in its name.
CNN: Many of the catacomb saints have jewels as eyes and gold decorations as smiles. Was there a motivation to make them more human looking?
PK: The decoration of these skeletons was not like a typical art movement, it was not like a modern movement like cubism or impressionism, where one artist is consciously aware of what others are doing stylistically and you can trace an evolution. There was no uniform style to the decoration of the skeletons, and there were marked regional variants.
One of those involved an attempt in some areas to humanize them by molding wax over the skull to give them fake faces, then glass eyes, wigs, and so on. The idea was that by making them "more human" looking, people would be able to achieve a more intimate bond with them. In other words, to make them seem less creepy.
CNN: What happened to the relics after people questioned their authenticity?
PK: Many were simply destroyed. In the nineteenth century, it was typical for people to pull off all the jewels as scrap, and simply throw the bones away or toss them in anonymous graves. So some of those which survived wound up in storage units, others in private collections and museum collections. I even found one hidden in a box within the altar of one of the local churches—the church itself had no idea that this "catacomb saint" was in this box. He had been hidden away in there for probably a century at least.
CNN: This saint was never photographed for publication until you photographed her for this book. Where is she housed?
PK: She is in a storage unit in the back of a parking garage, where she was sent decades ago because it was thought she was too macabre for modern eyes. Like I said, I lot of them fell out of history and were cast out. She was one of them.
CNN: Are there any examples of saints that were clearly inauthentic, but that survived anyway?
PK: Friedrich should have been destroyed. In the late eighteenth century, the Emperor Joseph II, who at that time ruled Austria, gave instructions that any relics that did not have a firm, acceptable provenance should be removed from their shrines and gotten rid of. He was a man of the Enlightenment, and this decree was to help get rid of silly superstitions and inappropriate veneration.
Friedrich could never have passed muster. Think about it: He is supposedly a martyr from the Roman catacombs, but his name is "Friedrich" —that's not even a Roman name. It's a German name, it's not even Latin. Probably the only reason he was not destroyed is that the skeleton had been a gift to the monastery from Joseph II's mother, Maria Theresa.
CNN: Did people choose to worship specific saints?
PK: Munditia was the patron saint of spinsters. Unmarried old women thus gravitated towards her as their saint and patron. She was boarded up for several decades—hidden away as too macabre for modern eyes. But then they removed the boards so she could be seen because she was such an important part of local history and folklore.
After the boards were removed a vandal broke into the church and smashed her shrine open, ran off with all the red and green jewels covering her body. The church restored her, put replicas in the place of the ones that had been stolen. But that incident is a sad episode, a sad commentary on how many of these skeletons were treated.
CNN: The skeletons might be seen as eerie or ostentatious. Did any groups object to the practice of decorating them?
PK: The Protestants of course despised these garish skeletons and thought them to be absurd. For the Protestants, these skeletons were a kind of worst-case-scenario example of the superstition that was rampant in Catholic Europe. One of the questions I often get asked, however, is if there was ever any evidence of objections on the Catholic side to lavishing obviously large amounts of money on these skeletons. The answer, perhaps surprising from a modern perspective, is no. In fact, quite the opposite. Locals typically welcomed these skeletons unquestioningly and with open arms.
CNN: Does the skeletal aesthetic still influence designers and artists today?
PK: There are definitely examples of similar types of things in the modern world, especially in the work of an artist like Damien Hirst, and the look seems to have filtered into popular culture in a kind of Pirates of the Caribbean aesthetic. But these skeletons so fell out of history, pretty much being known about only locally if at all, that it's hard to say if there is any direct line of descent between them and the cognates one might find in the modern world.
CNN: Which town or church has the best collection of jeweled skeletons today?
PK: Waldsassen still has ten of these skeletons, all on display, all still resplendent. It's the finest display of jeweled skeletons that still exists. It's like the Sistine Chapel of death in there. The incredible display includes one skeleton on each side altar, ten of them, and then two decorated skeletal busts behind the high altar, for a total of twelve, one for each month of the year. When people write to me, which they often do, and say, "If I want to see some of these in person, where should I go?," I always tell them to go to Waldsassen. It's an intact, incredible display of jeweled skeletons.
CNN: At any point did you share the awe of the 16th century Catholics who venerated these objects?
PK: Yes, definitely. When I was photographing them I was often possessed of a certain kind of empathy, this feeling of the veneration and love that was once given to them. It was an awesome but also sad feeling to know what these skeletons had once been, the power they were once thought to hold, and the meaning they once held for so many people, but were now denied. It was an often profound experience, measures of awe and sadness, and especially the latter.
The next document that refers to the painting is not until 16 June 1945, when the painting was listed as having been returned safely to the Louvre. Its whereabouts during the war are unrecorded. But are they unknown?
The latest word from the Louvre is that an identical copy of the Mona Lisa, also from the 16th century and difficult for any non-specialist to distinguish from the original, was one of a few thousand works that were gathered at the Musee Nationaux de la Recuperation, for whom owners could not be found. This copy was marked MNR 265. After five years had passed with no one able to prove ownership, it went to the Louvre. From 1950 onward, it hung on the wall outside the office of the director of the museum.
Based on the available evidence, and a little detective work, a plausible (though unconfirmed) conclusion may be reached as to what happened to the Mona Lisa during the war. A painting was crated up in 1939 and sent to various castles, just ahead of Nazi hands—but it was this 16th century copy, not the original. Knowing that the Mona Lisa would be such an obvious target for Nazi art hunters, the Louvre may have kept the original hidden in Paris, while the copy led the Nazis on a wild goose chase.
This would explain why the “Mona Lisa” did return from Altaussee, but why it may also be that the “Mona Lisa” never left Paris. It was the copy that was stolen, hidden at Altaussee, and recovered. Some who saw it assumed it was the original, while others, specifically the art-savvy Monuments Men who catalogued the art saved from the salt mine, recognized that it was only a copy.
To see Dr Charney giving a TEDx talk about the 1911 Mona Lisa theft, click here.