collecting. Everything about him was impressive—his ambition, his art, his fortune, his physical size, his enormous eggplant nose (he suffered from a condition called rhinophyma), even the black cigars he chomped.
In the United States at the turn of the twentieth century, making money was an open game with few rules, and there was no income tax to cut into fortunes. For every J. P. Morgan or Andréw Mellon, raised in wealth and well educated, there were two or more self-made millionaires. H. E. Huntington started as a logroller. P. A. B. Widener was a butcher from Philadelphia. Samuel H. Kress made his fortune in the five-and-dime. Frick and Carnegie were coal men. The diffident bachelor Benjamin Altman parlayed a pushcart into a fashionable Fifth Avenue emporium. Each had his eccentricities. Altman never liked to buy a painting unless he could pronounce the artist's name. He had a weakness for Renaissance madonnas.
The art of Europe offered a coveted cachet of class, conferring instant pedigree and prestige on men who had none. Flattered to be taken as gentlemen to the manner born, they were easy prey for duplicitous dealers and cagy con men peddling both stolen works and “genuine fakes.” ∗7 The Americans might be tough-nosed businessmen at home, but when they stepped off the gangplank in Cherbourg or Genoa, there were many waiting to take them by the hand and lead them down theproverbial garden path. James H. O'Brien, a businessman who was in Paris when Mona Lisa vanished, told
The Washington Post:
“Europeans look on Americans as good things.… They can spot Americans the moment they see them, and there's no use trying to masquerade. They go after you when you land and there is no escape.”
The Americans, so clever at making money, were easily gulled to part with it. For the relatively modest sum of one million dollars, a Baltimore magnate named Henry Walters came home with an entire collection, including, he believed, eight Raphaels and half a dozen Titians that were purportedly the family heirlooms of the considerably less than noble Don Marcello Mazzarenti. Then there was the entertaining Guglielmo Kopp who, after much haggling, accepted $20,000 ($500,000 today) for
Trajan's Column
from an American railroad tycoon. Boasting that he had wrangled a bargain price, the American went home to the heartland to await delivery.
Unlike many who didn't know a da Vinci from a David, J. P. Morgan was an astute collector, but even he suffered an occasional fleecing. He was once persuaded to put a sizable down payment on the bronze doors of Bologna's Duomo di San Pietro, which has no bronze doors.
Morgan was vacationing in Italy when Mona Lisa disappeared, and there were persistent rumors that the thief had brought the painting to him. He had recently been caught with a stolen art treasure, the Cope of Ascoli, in his collection. A magnificent gold and silk vestment once worn by Pope Nicholas IV, the cope had been lifted from a cathedral in Italy. When its provenance was disclosed, Morgan donated the vestment to the Italian government. Parisians wanted him to do no less for Mona Lisa. Morgan had dealt with art thieves once. Why not again?
The press pursued him more relentlessly than the police were pursuing any other suspect. The Cope of Ascoli notwithstanding,Morgan resented the intimations that he would traffic in stolen goods and rebuffed the reporters. “I have not been offered Mona Lisa,” he insisted, “and I regret it. Had it been offered, I should have bought it and given it back to France.”
I
Sunday, August 27
MONA LISA HAD BEEN MISSING for less than a week, but the pressure to break the case and recover the painting was relentless. Everyone even tangentially involved tried to escape responsibility by pinning the blame on someone else. Police charged inept museum management. Museum administrators blamed government lassitude. The Ministry of Beaux Arts concluded its administrative inquest with a sharply
In the United States at the turn of the twentieth century, making money was an open game with few rules, and there was no income tax to cut into fortunes. For every J. P. Morgan or Andréw Mellon, raised in wealth and well educated, there were two or more self-made millionaires. H. E. Huntington started as a logroller. P. A. B. Widener was a butcher from Philadelphia. Samuel H. Kress made his fortune in the five-and-dime. Frick and Carnegie were coal men. The diffident bachelor Benjamin Altman parlayed a pushcart into a fashionable Fifth Avenue emporium. Each had his eccentricities. Altman never liked to buy a painting unless he could pronounce the artist's name. He had a weakness for Renaissance madonnas.
The art of Europe offered a coveted cachet of class, conferring instant pedigree and prestige on men who had none. Flattered to be taken as gentlemen to the manner born, they were easy prey for duplicitous dealers and cagy con men peddling both stolen works and “genuine fakes.” ∗7 The Americans might be tough-nosed businessmen at home, but when they stepped off the gangplank in Cherbourg or Genoa, there were many waiting to take them by the hand and lead them down theproverbial garden path. James H. O'Brien, a businessman who was in Paris when Mona Lisa vanished, told
The Washington Post:
“Europeans look on Americans as good things.… They can spot Americans the moment they see them, and there's no use trying to masquerade. They go after you when you land and there is no escape.”
The Americans, so clever at making money, were easily gulled to part with it. For the relatively modest sum of one million dollars, a Baltimore magnate named Henry Walters came home with an entire collection, including, he believed, eight Raphaels and half a dozen Titians that were purportedly the family heirlooms of the considerably less than noble Don Marcello Mazzarenti. Then there was the entertaining Guglielmo Kopp who, after much haggling, accepted $20,000 ($500,000 today) for
Trajan's Column
from an American railroad tycoon. Boasting that he had wrangled a bargain price, the American went home to the heartland to await delivery.
Unlike many who didn't know a da Vinci from a David, J. P. Morgan was an astute collector, but even he suffered an occasional fleecing. He was once persuaded to put a sizable down payment on the bronze doors of Bologna's Duomo di San Pietro, which has no bronze doors.
Morgan was vacationing in Italy when Mona Lisa disappeared, and there were persistent rumors that the thief had brought the painting to him. He had recently been caught with a stolen art treasure, the Cope of Ascoli, in his collection. A magnificent gold and silk vestment once worn by Pope Nicholas IV, the cope had been lifted from a cathedral in Italy. When its provenance was disclosed, Morgan donated the vestment to the Italian government. Parisians wanted him to do no less for Mona Lisa. Morgan had dealt with art thieves once. Why not again?
The press pursued him more relentlessly than the police were pursuing any other suspect. The Cope of Ascoli notwithstanding,Morgan resented the intimations that he would traffic in stolen goods and rebuffed the reporters. “I have not been offered Mona Lisa,” he insisted, “and I regret it. Had it been offered, I should have bought it and given it back to France.”
I
Sunday, August 27
MONA LISA HAD BEEN MISSING for less than a week, but the pressure to break the case and recover the painting was relentless. Everyone even tangentially involved tried to escape responsibility by pinning the blame on someone else. Police charged inept museum management. Museum administrators blamed government lassitude. The Ministry of Beaux Arts concluded its administrative inquest with a sharply
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