Reading

Read the following text through quickly to answer these questions.

1. Has the “Mona Lisa”ever been stolen?

2. Is the painting in the Louvre the original?

With the real Mona Lisa please stand up?

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The paintings of renaissance scientist, inventor and musician Leonardo da Vinci have always attracted controversy. Only 14 works have ever been attributed to him and experts have questioned the authentic of several. Not even such a famous painting as the Mona Lisa is above suspicion. It is neither signed nor dated and no record of subsequent payment to Leonardo has ever been found.

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The painting believed to be a portrait of the wife of a Florentine merchant, is dated at about 1502. It has been on public display in the Louvre since 1804. Now housed in bullet-prove glass case, it has always been surrounded by tight security. Even so on 24 August 1911, it was stolen. Initial leads came to nothing and no clues to the thief’s motives or the whereabouts of the picture materialized for 15 months. At one point Picasso, then relatively unknown, came under suspicion, but there was no evidence to suggest that he did anything more serious than “borrow” some neglected tribal pieces from the museum.

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In November 1913, Florentine art dealer Alfredo Geri received a letter from someone claiming they had the Mona Lisa. The writer of the letter prepared to sell it back to Italy for 500, 000 lire. Geri contacted the director of the Uffizi museum in Florence, who arranged a meeting with the person who had written to Geri. This person turned out to be an Italian carpenter, Vincenzo Perruggia, who had been commissioned by the Louvre to make the painting’s protective wooden box. He had been able to steal the famous work of the art because he knew the museum’s routine so well. The Mona Lisa he produced was proclaiming genuine by the Uffizi and sent back to Paris. The big question was why did Peruggia wait so long before trying to sell the painting?

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One explanation is that he was a accomplice of the criminal the Marques de Valfierno, who had copies made of the Mona Lisa while it was still in the Louvre. Once the theft was announced, Valfierno went to America where he sold “the original Mona Lisa” six times over to wealthy collectors for two million dollars. Perrugia was left with the original painting and realizing that Valfierno was never going to contact him again, attempted to make some money by selling it. As for the American collectors, they couldn’t complain for fear of revealing their involvement in the crime. Intriguingly a number of “original Mona Lisa” have since turned up in America.

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But there is another theory. Shortly after the theft, Parisian art dealer Eduard Jonas claimed he was in possession of the original Mona Lisa. He subsequently changed his story under threat of being charged with its theft and declared it a fake. Later, however, a British conman, Jack Dean, insisted that he had helped Perrugia steal the painting, but substituted a copy for the original before Perrugia took it to Italy. Dean claimed to have sold the original to a Paris art dealer. If Dean’s story is true, and Jonas incident gives it some support, then the painting now in Louvre, surrounded by impregnable security systems and seen by thousands of visitors a day, is a forgery.

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Is there any way of knowing for certain? It would seem that there is. A method known as “neutron activation analysis”, has been used on a number of occasions to establish the authenticity of works of art. It involves bombarding the painting with neutrons so as to identify chemical elements in the paint. It can be used to determine exactly when a painting was produced since chemical elements in even tiny traces of paint vary according to the period of painting. If the directors of the Louvre chose to, they could put the painting’s neutrons to the test and perhaps the real Mona Lisa at last stand up.