As far as anyone has been able to determine, the earliest known symptoms of the condition which would come to be known by various epithets — "the Mona Lisa virus," "Mona Lisa's malaise," etc. — first appeared in a loan feasibility study conducted in December of 1999 at the behest of the French Minister of Culture, Henri Juppé, in anticipation of a world fundraising tour for the Louvre. In that study, AGA Art Insurance Corporation of Chicago valued the world's most famous painting at a mere 450 million dollars.
Doubting the validity of the figure, Juppé and his staff solicited a second appraisal. A syndicate of Lloyd's of London, using a more liberal model, returned an appraisal of $460 million. Equally troubling, if not more so, it soon came to light that attendance in the Salle des États, Mona Lisa's home in the Louvre, had dropped from six million visitors the previous year to just over four million, a decrease of thirty-three percent—roughly the same percentage as the diminished valuation.
Putting his plans for the tour on hold, Juppé began a thorough investigation, installing guards with manual counters in the Salle des États to verify or refute the numbers being generated by computer analysis of CCTV footage. Questionnaires designed to determine the level of interest in the painting were printed in all major languages and distributed to visitors.
It is worth remembering that many people who at the peak of her popularity waited in long queues for a chance to glimpse Mona Lisa did so not out of any genuine interest in art; rather they came in order to say in all honesty that they had seen the most famous painting in the world with their own eyes. Their responses, predictably superficial, yielded little of value to Juppé's investigation. Nor were the feelings of the small core of knowledgeable patrons of the arts of much use to him. Still, the survey produced some illuminating findings. Plotting a chart of negative comments over the course of the six-month survey, Juppé identified five stages in what appeared to be an inexplicable plunge in esteem for Mona Lisa, from indifference at one end of the spectrum to outright hostility at the other, of which the following responses, maintaining Juppé's chronology, are a fair sample:
- "Smaller than I thought she would be."
- "Like fashion models—better in photos than in person."
- "Disappointing after waiting an hour."
- "All I felt was annoyance."
- "A complete waste of time."
But it wasn't until Stanford behavioural economist William Klein released the results of his virtual auction that the notion of some kind of malady afflicting Mona Lisa finally gained traction. With the tacit support of both the Louvre and the French Ministry of Culture, whose concerns over projections of collateral damage to French tourism it was Klein's remit to quell, twelve of the most esteemed art buyers in the world were asked to participate in a blind auction of Mona Lisa. The auction was designed not so much to extrapolate her true market value, which only the market itself could determine, as to measure any changes in "perceived" value over a given period. The rules were as follows: each bidder was to receive a thousand dollars in credit with which to make his bid. The lowest bidder would receive the value of his bid in cash. The highest would win a private viewing of Mona Lisa removed from her niche, a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. Three separate auctions, employing the same twelve bidders, were conducted at three-month intervals. The results, withheld until the end of the final auction to prevent collusion, were alarming: in just six months the average bid for Mona Lisa had dropped by eight percent, from $480 to $440. In the tug of war between cash and cachet, the former appeared to have more sway.
Libération was the first to report on the puzzling devaluation of France's most esteemed national treasure. While the reporter admirably confined herself to demonstrable facts — "These numbers, supposing they are accurate, are hardly surprising given the global economic climate," — the story was soon gracing the pages of free commuter dailies around the world, nestled between accounts of bizarre murders and the sex lives of celebrities. "Mona Lisa Dying!" the headlines shouted. Much was made of the strange coincidence between declining attendance and the apparent decrease in her market value, but no credible explanations for either were offered. Culture critics writing for the weekend supplements of more reputable periodicals mused on a number of tangential subjects — the burdens of fame in the twenty-first century, the symbolization of enigmas, the conservative politics of art museums — but they were no better equipped with answers than their more sensationalistic counterparts.
Partly in the hope of clearing the Louvre itself of suspicion, but more crucially with the aim of restoring Mona Lisa's tarnished luster while raising some much-needed cash for the museum, Juppé dusted off his plan to send Mona Lisa on tour. After two years of meticulous preparations, during which time attendance in the Salle des États had fallen by another million visitors, Mona Lisa left home for the first time in fifty years. By this stage her official indemnity value, as stated in the AGA policy, was a mere $390 million, a figure that would cast an ominous shadow over the entire tour.
Mona Lisa's junket had all the hallmarks of a washed-up rock band's farewell tour—posters on plywood hoardings in unsavory parts of the world's major cities, scandalous ticket prices, cynics condemning it as a ploy to flog bygone glory for cash. That particular criticism, in the end, proved unwarranted, as the lackluster box office around the globe eloquently attested. Apart from those moved by her waning fame, it seemed that no one was much interested in a five hundred year-old portrait of a Florentine silk merchant's wife.
After two years on the road and a loss of $43 million, Mona Lisa returned home to find that she had been usurped by an unlikely rival. In her absence her empty niche had begun to draw crowds nearly as large as those she herself once drew. The tourist hordes were once again taxing the batteries of their digital cameras, wowing friends and family back home with snaps of a barren wall behind bullet-proof glass. Herd instinct aside, their responses when asked why they were doing this revealed a growing conviction, in some cases a fatalism bordering on the apocalyptic, that Mona Lisa's days were indeed numbered.
With attendance in the Salle des États back up to four million and rising, Juppé made the controversial decision to remove Paolo Veronese's Marriage at Cana from the opposite end of the gallery and hang Mona Lisa in its place, hoping that by sharing the same room with her empty niche she might benefit, if only by association, from the public's growing fondness for her absence. But as soon as she was back on display, the crowds began to dwindle again. Her presence, it seemed, only robbed her absence of its poignancy. One of them had to go.
Under the pretense of undertaking a major restoration project, Juppé announced that Mona Lisa was to be removed from display until further notice. The immediate return of the crowds attested to the wisdom of his decision. Unfortunately for him, it was too little, too late. Henri Juppé, after fourteen years of loyal service to the Fifth Republic, was discreetly asked to resign.
*
When asked in the second televised debate of the following year's presidential election whether or not he would ever consider selling Mona Lisa, the UMP candidate, Philippe Bayrou, in a calculated gamble on his platform of bold pragmatism, confidently replied that "If given the choice between making life easier for the French taxpayer or holding onto an old painting out of allegiance to an atavistic notion of cultural superiority, I would not hesitate to sell Mona Lisa." The Socialist incumbent, who six months earlier had made the unfortunate comparison between Mona Lisa and the Bastille, could not help but laugh at his hopelessly philistine opponent. This public display of naked arrogance, indulged abroad, satirized at home, would come to be seen as the moment the President lost the election—and France lost Mona Lisa.
This is not the place to revive the vicious ideological battles sparked by Bayrou's gambit. Suffice it to say that with a growing suspicion, however groundless, that Mona Lisa had become a toxic asset, the new President took a stand and announced that France was seeking a buyer for Leonardo's masterpiece. It must also be added that like so many of his predecessors, who yearned to leave their mark on France's cultural legacy, Bayrou's dream was to create a satellite of the Louvre in Limoges, his birthplace, devoted exclusively to French folk art. He would need an infusion of cash to finance the acquisitions and the sexy new building to house them in.
The auction was held at Hôtel Drouot. Television crews from around the world descended on Paris. All down Rue Rivoli, street artists worked tirelessly to capitalize on the historic moment: pavement painters depicted her in chalk, in coins, in plastic bottle caps; human statues in flowing black gowns stood for hours, motionless but for an uncanny, following gaze. Entrepreneurs from every corner of the globe, flouting the law, peddled their Mona Lisa kitsch wherever they could. The entire week preceding the auction, the airwaves and cyber-channels were inundated with all things Mona: old documentaries, news features, panel discussions, profiles of prospective bidders, man-on-the-street interviews. Experts expounded on the arcane rules and lexicon of art auctions, priming the viewer for the drama about to unfold in the Grand-Salle of Hôtel Drouot. All this frenzy was enough to make one wonder if Mona Lisa's troubles hadn't in fact been overstated and France was making a grave mistake. And while the burning question could not be answered with any certainty, some experts speculated that the painting could fetch as much as a billion dollars.
For six years the as-yet-unproven devaluation of the painting, commensurate with (or resulting from) the demonstrable decline in general interest, had monopolized the public discourse. Now the art critics and historians were dragged before the cameras and interrogated by impatient television presenters demanding a concise explanation for why this painting ever became so popular in the first place. In their efforts to extricate art from celebrity, the experts bored the viewers with encomiums on Leonardo's mastery of three-dimensional perspective; on the remarkable sfumato technique he used on her flesh, equal in suppleness to anything in Rembrandt or Courbet; on the convergences with and divergences from the template of the seated Madonna, dating as far back as the Council of Ephesus. But one could sense in the hesitations between their words that they no longer quite believed what they were saying.
On the day of the auction a crowd of protesters consisting of French nationalists, anti-globalization activists, and a coalition of small business owners who traded around the Louvre converged outside Hôtel Drouot. The protest remained peaceful even as the three hundred in-person bidders began to arrive by taxi and limousine, although it must be said that one unfortunate bidder, a Taiwanese telecoms tycoon, would be forced to endure the auction with the sweet reek of Mona Lisa Mon Amour perfuming his head and shoulders.
Catalogue entry for lot 16:
Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519)
Portrait of Lisa Gioconda, c. 1503-1519
Oil on poplar
30 in X 21 in (77 cm X 53 cm)
A gasp rippled through the room and around the world as the auctioneer announced the suggested opening bid (SOB) of €195 million. The abysmal SOB did make for some lively thrust and parry in the opening exchanges, but the auction turned sluggish around the €220 million mark, the bidders pinned down in minor skirmishes. Despite the auctioneer's well-paced chandeliering, the bidding stalled at €232.5 million, well below the €250 million reserve required for the sale.
Notwithstanding the handful of stalwart optimists who pointed to her many wealthy suitors, the rejection of Mona Lisa on the auction block was the final verdict for those who were still in denial that something was gravely wrong with her. The assumption until then, borne out by the historical record, had always been that the world's art treasures, barring acts of God, were immune to devaluation, either of their real or their cultural capital. It was inconceivable that if periodically put to the test of the market, Tutankhamun's funeral mask, say, or Michelangelo's David would not keep pace with or surpass the rate of inflation. It was as if these objects, being "priceless," were no longer of this world, where everything has a price, but were composed of more rarefied matter. Until facts to the contrary arose, Mona Lisa was queen of this ethereal realm.
The second auction was held two months later, to much less fanfare. The reserve price lowered, Mona Lisa was sold to Zhou Zhengyi, Chinese industrialist, for the record sum of €228.5 ($318) million—the highest price ever paid for a single work of art. In the euphoria that followed, it was almost forgotten that the world's most famous painting had just been sold for less than half of what by all known measures her true market value should have been.
We need not drown again in the oceans of ink spilled during that sad epoch to fathom that the loss of Mona Lisa to the Chinese was universally regarded as the symbolic tilting point in the balance of power between East and West. In a flush of national pride, the Chinese government, with the gracious consent of Mr. Zhou, requisitioned the production of a hundred million hand-painted copies of Mona Lisa. "Original Chinese copy of Occidental masterpiece in every home in the People's Republic" was the official slogan of this unprecedented public relations campaign. A hundred "designers" working in rotating shifts from a studio in Mr. Zhou's corporate headquarters painted the master forgeries from which an army of university art graduates would in turn paint the millions of copies. Sixteen factories were outfitted for the monumental undertaking in the coastal city of Xiamen, each painter specializing in a single aspect of the portrait: hands, eyes, gown, hair, landscape, etc., the canvases advancing down the assembly line via robotic arms outfitted with rubber hands. An elite corps of the most promising artists was awarded the enviable task of reproducing the enigmatic smile.
In less than six months, over fifty million Mona Lisas had made their way, subsidized by the Communist Party, onto the walls of Chinese homes. But the promise of this great vision, in the end, would remain unfulfilled. As the euphoria of victory faded, it dawned on the people that they didn't actually like Mona Lisa. She seemed to be mocking them, many said. She never took her eyes off of them. The turbines of the Three Gorges Dam would soon be choking on the slurry of sodden canvases floating down the Yangtze. Production at Xiamen was halted. The government tried to unload the millions of unsold Mona Lisas onto big box retailers in the US and Europe, but the only taker, of a mere six thousand, was a Florida condominium consortium.
*
Though they surely abound, it is hard to find examples parallel to Mona Lisa's in the history of art, or the history of the art market, precisely because forgotten works no longer interest us and hence have vanished from our books. Take the example of Amadeo Battista Gaetana, the 16th century Italian painter and sculptor. A brief perusal of the ledgers of the Medicis reveals him to have been considered the absolute pinnacle of artistic achievement, far greater than Leonardo, destined to shine down on mankind for all eternity. Today not a single one of his paintings or sculptures is displayed in any art museum or gallery in the world. The only museum known to possess in its holdings any of his works, a marble bust of Catherine de' Medici, is the Fort Wayne Museum of Art in Indiana. Tastes change, sometimes glacially, sometimes in the blink of an eye. The passage of time reveals the flaws of present fancy.
What made Mona Lisa's case so confounding was that unlike that of Gaetana and other once-great artists whom time had forgotten, the rest of Leonardo's oeuvre remained unscathed. To this day no other work by the Florentine master has ever diminished in value. It was as if our long-held suspicion that Mona Lisa was in fact a fairly dull painting of a fairly dull woman was suddenly confirmed, and all it took was a single low insurance valuation to plunge her into a downward spiral.
With growth in the Chinese economy holding at a stagnant five percent, Mr. Zhou's financial advisors counseled him to shed some of his non-essential assets. After several unsuccessful attempts to sell her back to the West at a profit, Zhou settled for $240 million (a loss of nearly $80 million) in a private sale to the Russian oil baron Viktor Kasyanov. No sooner had Kasyanov purchased Mona Lisa than the price of oil, punctured by falling demand from the Chinese, began to plummet. A superstitious man by nature, Kasyanov refused to see this as mere coincidence. His efforts to rid himself of Mona Lisa would last two quarters and cost him $35 million.
A partial list of Mona Lisa's subsequent owners includes a Belgian investment banker, a Brazilian bauxite magnate, an Irish racehorse breeder—each otherwise clear-eyed investor convincing himself that she had surely touched bottom and would soon begin her recovery. Time would prove each of them wrong. As she plummeted there would be sputters and flurries of upward speculation, largely generated by an almost macabre fascination with the descent itself, but these brief spurts ultimately served only to accelerate her subsequent plunge. Some began to question whether Mona Lisa actually was the work of da Vinci. Others wondered if the devaluating painting wasn't in fact one of the twentieth century's abundant forgeries, or one of the recent Chinese ones, and the real painting was still sequestered in the vaults of the Louvre. These speculations, easily refuted by infrared scan, only served to cheapen her further. The slightest hint of a stain on the reputation of an innocent woman, no matter how unfounded, is ruinous. All the efforts of valiant art historians and critics to defend her honor, to divert us from the compelling blood sport of the market by singing the praises of her eternal virtues — her mischievous charm, her knowing gaze, her marvelously contemporary humanity embodied by her enigmatic smile — were to no avail.
By this stage public interest in the painting had so deteriorated that the private sales, still for otherwise remarkable sums, no longer merited the slightest mention in the mainstream press or any of its scavenging tributaries. Mona Lisa was now hurtling well under the celebrity radar. To make matters worse, away from her climate-controlled niche her age had begun to catch up with her. The crack in her poplar panel, stable since the mid-eighteenth century, had advanced well past her hairline, spawning a tracery of fissures across her forehead. A film of dust and air pollution from the world she had been forced to inhabit with us mortals gradually settled over her skin, turning her once-golden glow to tarnished brass.
Enter L.J. "Red Beard" Johnson, Texas oil man. With full cognizance of the risks, he takes Mona Lisa off the hands of the Australian National Gallery (drought, budget cuts) for the paltry sum of $63 million. Convinced that no matter how low she drops she will eventually bounce back, Johnson is determined to ride her all the way down, come hell or high water. If nothing else, he tells himself, the tale of her tribulations, culminating with him, will be "as hot as a whorehouse on nickel night" to a Hollywood producer.
True to his word Johnson holds onto Mona Lisa for three years. Unlike his predecessors, he never removes her from the crate she arrived in. Instead he stores her in an empty grain silo on the old Johnson family farm, reasoning that keeping her in quarantine is the best way to nurse her back to health. When at last something in Johnson's gut tells him that the time has come to sell, he is pained to discover upon unpacking her that the cancer has metastasized. (Johnson must be credited as the first to have used that particular analogy.) The dark, damp heat of the silo is a fertile breeding ground for deathwatch beetles, who have aerated the oak support frame and maple crosspieces, though by some fluke of nature they have refrained from indulging on the poplar panel or the paint, which may be read, by those so inclined, as either an allegory of reverence or distaste.
Among the more interesting, if not entirely plausible, explanations for Mona Lisa's downfall offered at the time — an Al-Qaeda conspiracy; David Copperfield's most astounding disappearing act; the universe beginning its long-awaited contraction, to name but a few — was German pathoeconomist Friedrich Schumann's theory of financial cancers: strange malignancies afflicting commodities and other financial "bodies" for no explicable or discernible reason, sending first their exchange values, then the entire "organism," into precipitous death-spirals. Unlike the economic viruses behind recessions and depressions, these are random mutations, incommunicable, self-contained, self-annihilating. In short, his diagnosis was that Mona Lisa was suffering from fiduciary carcinoma, and the prognosis was not good.
Schumann's theory was widely condemned by orthodox economists. "A nice metaphor," they said, "with absolutely no basis in economic theory, law, or reality itself." One obvious shortcoming was that it didn't address the relationship between the inexplicable loss of interest in the painting and its calamitous depreciation. Attempting to fill this lacuna, Swedish neuroeconomist Stefan Forsberg, best known for his work on the neural locations of "money illusion" (the phenomenon in which people ignore the distorting effects of inflation and decide that a given commodity is worth much more than it really is,) replaced Schumann's pathological etiology with a neurological one. Reasoning that if the fundamental mechanism of the free price system is subjective value judgement, Forsberg concluded that of course Mona Lisa's malaise must be located in the human brain, not in the market. In other words, if beauty is in the eye of the beholder, then irrational monetary valuations are in the neurons of the frontal lobes. "Whatever this thing is," he hypothesized, "it is in ourselves. The cancer, for lack of a better word, is not in the painting but in the minds that perceive it." Not surprisingly, none of the remarkable imaging tools that we have devised to visualize our brains has ever been able to find a Mona Lisa-shaped tumor in our collective ventromedial prefrontal cortexes.
*
The final chapter of Mona Lisa's demise follows the sad and predictable trajectory of the fallen star. Despised and ignored as an insult to her former glory, she wastes away in obscurity. We cherish sudden deaths, but don't ask us to watch the agonies of a long, slow decay. Perhaps our only consolation is the knowledge that she was relieved, by the very malady that brought her to this pass, of the indignity of her death being turned into a spectacle.
A million dollars was all that the Texan could salvage from his investment. By removing her from the sunshine of supply and demand, he had only hastened Mona Lisa's decline. Nor did Hollywood come knocking. "She's all played out," he conceded after the sale to Doug Peterson, the enterprising young founder of an internet startup whose product was digitally-designed tattoo templates of Renaissance paintings. The Peterson sale was the final documented purchase of Mona Lisa, if not the last transaction involving her. That dubious honor goes to a business loan for $100,000 that Mr. Peterson negotiated with Bank of the West using the painting as collateral.
At this point the historical record grows hazy, and we are obliged to rely on anecdotal evidence, with the usual caveats. Unable to get the financing he needs, Mr. Peterson's young company begins to founder. He lays off staff and cancels his contract with his janitorial service. One of the employees of the cleaning company, purportedly a Hispanic man named Hector Gonzales (or Romero), in dire financial straits himself, succumbs to temptation and, using the key that he had had the foresight to duplicate for just such an eventuality, unlawfully enters the premises one night and makes off with as much computer equipment and other booty as he can fit into his truck.
It hardly merits mentioning that by this point the public's interest in Mona Lisa, financial or otherwise, is for all intents and purposes nonexistent. The thief has no idea that the old-looking painting he has stolen was once the single most revered and expensive work of art in the history of civilization. It looks vaguely familiar to him, which is enough to compel him in the nervous hurry of his larceny to chuck it in with the rest of the stuff in the bed of his pickup. Six months later the painting will allegedly turn up at Easy Money Pawn & Jewels on East 14th Street in Oakland, California. The owner of the establishment, Daeshanda Shields, while unable to produce any receipts to the effect, believes that after the owner forfeited his claim she sold it to "a fat white dude" for $200. The story of the painting being thrown in to seal the deal on a one-dollar garden hose at a yard sale in nearby El Cerrito must be considered apocryphal.
There have been many alleged sightings over the years by the overly credulous, the sort who believe that Elvis and Michael Jackson are presently hard at work on a duet, but given the relative youth of the witnesses and the perseverance of the Chinese forgeries, they should be taken with a grain of salt. One of the most dogged of these, which in all likelihood makes it an urban legend, is the account of three teenage boys throwing darts at her in a garage in Ghent, New York, though there are others equally harrowing to the nostalgic among us.
Reproductions in myriad forms do still exist, though it is increasingly rare to find them anywhere on display. Being more perishable than their original, they too will soon disappear. Mona Lisa web searches yield rock bands, cosmetic lines, a transvestite support group, but only occasional references, hidden away deep in the footnotes of outdated art history conference papers, to the once-famous portrait. The physical books that contain her image may still be around hundreds of years hence, but if, in our own time, these books are seldom consulted anymore, what is the likelihood of anyone perusing them when they are kept in vaults deep in the bowels of the earth, serving only as a measure of how far humanity has progressed? In time all we will be left with is the memory of her enigmatic smile. And that, too, if we are lucky, will vanish before we do.
© 2014 James Terry
