Friend of a Friend . . ._Understanding the Hidden Networks That Can Transform Your Life and Your Career by David Burkus

Author:David Burkus
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Business, self help
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Published: 2018-05-01T00:00:00+00:00

The Most Famous Smile in the World . . . Because It’s the Most Famous Smile in the World

The most famous female face in the world is arguably that of Lisa Gherardini.16 Her husband was a wealthy silk merchant who had commissioned a portrait of his wife. The portrait took some time, and neither Gherardini nor her husband ever saw the finished product. Hopefully, they never had to pay for it either. When it was finally finished, sixteen years after it was commissioned, it was sold to France’s King François I. The seller was the Italian artist and inventor Leonardo da Vinci, and the painting was the Mona Lisa. It is now perhaps the most famous painting in the world, though a few others by Leonardo himself might rival its fame. It hangs in Paris’s Musée du Louvre behind a climate-controlled, entirely bulletproof case. Six million people visit the painting in person every year. Hundreds of millions more see reproductions of it on everything from posters to coffee cups, tote bags, and T-shirts. It has been photographed, parodied, forged, and far worse (as we’ll see).

But perhaps the most curious thing about the painting wasn’t how long it took Leonardo to finish it, but how long it took to become famous. Though it was completed in 1519, it spent its first 300 years as little more than a hallway decoration for European royalty. It wasn’t considered terrible—just ordinary. When it was eventually moved to the Louvre around the turn of the nineteenth century, it didn’t garner much attention: Leonardo wasn’t really considered a spectacular painter until the mid-1800s. And the Mona Lisa likely would have remained hanging in obscurity in the halls of the Louvre, appreciated only by art critics and historians, had it not been for an audacious act of patriotism—and theft.

On August 21, 1911, a group of men led by Vincenzo Peruggia stole the Mona Lisa.17 Peruggia was Italian, and some accounts say he was upset that a painting by the Italian legend Leonardo was stuck in a French museum.18 The four men snuck into the museum the night before; Peruggia arranged for their entry, as he was working on the museum’s renovation at the time.19 They spent the night sleeping hidden in a storeroom. The following morning, a national holiday, they awoke, seized the painting off the wall, and hurried out a side entrance. No one saw them, and if they had, they would have assumed they were merely workmen. No one noticed that the painting was gone until twenty-six hours later—partly because of the holiday and partly because the painting was not very popular.

Then something funny happened. Peruggia and his crew had indeed stolen an unpopular painting—but the theft of the Mona Lisa propelled it to extreme popularity. Within forty-eight hours, news of the theft had spread around the world. People began hanging wanted posters around Paris and crowds gathered at police stations. Rumors and conspiracy theories sprang up. Some argued that the whole thing was a hoax.

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