About 500 Words
When the Mona Lisa was stolen in 1911, Pablo Picasso and his close friend, the poet Guillaume Apollinaire, were arrested (Picasso said in court he had never met Apollinaire, an act he later said made him “ashamed”). They had nothing to do with the theft, however, and were let off.
The theft and the recovery kept the Mona Lisa in the news, making it the most famous painting in the world. When it went missing, people turned up at the Louvre to gaze at the empty space on the wall.
Is the Mona Lisa more valuable with cake dripping off its face? It was not something Leonardo da Vinci thought of. It was painted in the sixteenth century, and now half a millennium later, here it is in the news yet again.
A man pretending to be a woman in a wheelchair thought it would attract the world’s attention to his cause if he smeared the glass protecting the painting with a creamy cake. “Think of the earth,” he told those present.
Sadly, the tourists were thinking of anything but. There was a lady in the second row who was thinking she might not have turned off the oven before leaving home in Canada. Another remembered the Laurel and Hardy movies from childhood where they threw cakes at each other. It is rumoured she actually laughed. A child beside her was thinking of the ice cream she had been promised if she behaved herself.
Only a few of them actually saw the Mona Lisa, leave alone the cake. Most visitors spend time and money only to see the backs of other visitors who have spent time and money.
As to thinking of the earth, you do that sometimes when you see a painting in a gallery – because that’s what it costs.
But when you see an old woman suddenly transform into a young man and get off a wheelchair to smear an iconic painting with cake, it is unlikely you are about to think of the earth, even if that is the course recommended by the smearer. Half a dozen people looked around to see if the other paintings had burst into laughter like those around someone who has had cake thrown at their face do.
No one laughed in 1911 when the Mona Lisa was stolen and taken to Italy to be displayed there. The thief was under the mistaken impression it had been originally stolen from Italy by France. We are assured the painting he returned was the original, but can you tell the difference between a Mona Lisa poster on which you drew a moustache and the one hanging now in the Louvre?
There’s something about the smile that convinces modern artists it is incomplete without a moustache; maybe thick and growling, or at least a wispy one, but distinct and unmistakable.
And if you do think of the earth when you come across the Mona Lisa next, the smearer would not have smeared in vain. Pavlov would have understood.
(Suresh Menon is Contributing Editor, The Hindu)
