![]() | This article or section may fail to make a clear distinction between fact and fiction .(May 2019) |
Yves Chaudron was a supposed French master art forger who is alleged to have copied images of Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa as part of Eduardo de Valfierno's famous 1911 Mona Lisa painting theft. In reality he may be a fictional character created by Karl Decker for an article that ran in a 1932 issue of the Saturday Evening Post, and passed off as a real person. There is also very little evidence that Valfierno actually existed, or if he did, that he was involved in the theft of the Mona Lisa at all.
Valfierno's account was relayed by reporter Karl Decker, in the Saturday Evening Post's “Why and How the Mona Lisa Was Stolen,” June 25, 1932.' According to Decker, Valfierno had provided details of the theft in confidence; to be published only after his death. [1]
According to that account, in 1910, Valfierno had conspired with Chaudron to steal the Mona Lisa and produce copies of the painting which would then be sold to private buyers as the genuine painting. The plan had been to sell each copy as the "original" while the location of the real painting was unknown. [2]
Chaudron, "spent the winter of 1910 creating clones of Leonardo's great portrait" while Valfierno made arrangements to steal the real painting. [3] In the early hours of 21 August 1911, Louvre employee Vincenzo Peruggia and two accomplices carried the Mona Lisa out of the museum covered in a painter's smock. [4]
Decker asserts that six Chaudron copies had already been sent to the United States ahead of the theft and while the stolen original remained in France, Valfierno followed his fakes and sold each for up to US$300,000. [5] The original remained hidden for two years until Peruggia, presenting himself as Leonardo Vincenzo, tried to sell it in Florence, Italy. A museum administrator there was suspicious, reported the attempted sale and Peruggia was arrested. The original Mona Lisa was returned to the Louvre in 1913.
More than 100 years later, none of these six paintings has ever surfaced, bringing into question if they ever in fact existed. Further, the only evidence that the "famed forger" Yves Chaudron even existed is Karl Decker's 1932 Saturday Evening Post article. There are no known photos of the man or relatives or any biographical details outside of this incident. None of his other forged works has ever come to light, and it is quite impossible to be a 'famed forger' if none of your forgeries is discovered. Decker's entire 1932 article may be a work of fiction that, much like forgeries in the art world, has fooled many who have read it.
According to Valfierno's account, the mysterious Chaudron retired to the countryside only months after the theft and the completion of the forgeries. He is said to have continued to produce forgeries of other artists' work , but never to the same scale as his work related to the Mona Lisa theft. Again, no works by Chaudron, forged or otherwise, have ever been located. As Valfierno's account was only released in 1932 (some years after the supposed death of Chaudron), there was no arrest or trail of the mysterious forger and his role in the theft was effectively unknown during his lifetime, only being revealed in the 1932 article. [1] Yves Chaudron was most likely a creation of Karl Decker that fit well into a story of a criminal mastermind and his associates, that readers of the article assumed was genuine. His name still pops up in lists of the top forgers of the 20th century, despite there being no forged works of art found that can be attributed to anyone named Chaudron.
The Mona Lisa is a half-length portrait painting by Italian artist Leonardo da Vinci. Considered an archetypal masterpiece of the Italian Renaissance, it has been described as "the best known, the most visited, the most written about, the most sung about, the most parodied work of art in the world". The painting's novel qualities include the subject's enigmatic expression, the monumentality of the composition, the subtle modelling of forms, and the atmospheric illusionism.
Art forgery is the creating and selling of works of art which are falsely credited to other, usually more famous artists. Art forgery can be extremely lucrative, but modern dating and analysis techniques have made the identification of forged artwork much simpler.
Vincenzo Peruggia was an Italian museum worker, artist, and thief, most famous for stealing the Mona Lisa on 21 August 1911.
La Belle Ferronnière is a portrait of a lady, usually attributed to Leonardo da Vinci, in the Louvre. It is also known as Portrait of an Unknown Woman. The painting's title, applied as early as the seventeenth century, identifying the sitter as the wife or daughter of an ironmonger, was said to be discreetly alluding to a reputed mistress of Francis I of France, married to a certain Le Ferron. Later she was identified as Lucretia Crivelli, a married lady-in-waiting to Duchess Beatrice of Milan, who became another of the Duke's mistresses.
Events from the year 1932 in art.
Leonardo da Vinci was an Italian Renaissance painter and polymath who achieved legendary fame and iconic status within his own lifetime. His renown primarily rests upon his brilliant achievements as a painter, the Mona Lisa and The Last Supper, being two of the most famous artworks ever created, but also upon his diverse skills as a scientist and inventor. He became so highly valued during his lifetime that the King of France bore him home like a trophy of war, supported him in his old age and, according to legend, cradled his head as he died.
Eduardo de Valfierno, who posed as a marqués (marquis), was supposedly an Argentine con man who allegedly masterminded the theft of the Mona Lisa in 1911. There are serious doubts as to whether or not he existed.
The Isleworth Mona Lisa is an early sixteenth-century oil on canvas painting depicting the same subject as Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa, though with the subject depicted as being a younger age. The painting is thought to have been brought from Italy to England in the 1780s, and came into public view in 1913 when the English connoisseur Hugh Blaker acquired it from a manor house in Somerset, where it was thought to have been hanging for over a century. Since the 1910s, experts in various fields, as well as the collectors who have acquired ownership of the painting, have asserted that the major elements of the painting are the work of Leonardo himself, as an earlier version of the Mona Lisa.
Anthony Gene Tetro, known as Tony Tetro, is an art forger known for his perfectionism in copies of artwork produced in the 1970s and 1980s. Tetro never received formal art lessons, but learned from books, by painting and experimentation. Over three decades, Tetro forged works by Rembrandt, Joan Miró, Marc Chagall, Salvador Dalí and Norman Rockwell and others. Tetro's paintings and lithographs, known for their perfectionism, were sold by art dealers and auction houses as legitimate works and hang in museums, galleries around the world. He was caught after Hiro Yamagata found a forgery of his own work for sale in a gallery. In 1991, Tetro was called by Gary Helton, an investigator for a California district attorney, as being "one of the two major [art] forgers in the United States."
The Theft of the Mona Lisa is a 1931 German drama film directed by Géza von Bolváry and starring Trude von Molo, Willi Forst, and Gustaf Gründgens. It is based on a true story.
Gian Giacomo Caprotti da Oreno, better known as Salaì was an Italian artist and pupil of Leonardo da Vinci from 1490 to 1518. Salaì entered Leonardo's household at the age of ten. He created paintings under the name of Andrea Salaì. He was described as one of Leonardo's students and lifelong servant and is thought by some to be the model for Leonardo's St. John the Baptist and Bacchus.
Salvator Mundi is a painting attributed in whole or in part to the Italian High Renaissance artist Leonardo da Vinci, dated to c. 1499–1510. Long thought to be a copy of a lost original veiled with overpainting, it was rediscovered, restored, and included in Luke Syson's major Leonardo exhibition at the National Gallery, London, in 2011–12. Christie's claimed just after selling the work that most leading scholars consider it to be an original work by Leonardo, but this attribution has been disputed by other specialists, some of whom posit that he only contributed certain elements.
The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to forgery:
Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa is one of the most recognizable and famous works of art in the world, and also one of the most replicated and reinterpreted. Mona Lisa replicas were already being painted during Leonardo's lifetime by his own students and contemporaries. Some are claimed to be the work of Leonardo himself, and remain disputed by scholars. Prominent 20th-century artists such as Marcel Duchamp and Salvador Dalí have also produced derivative works, manipulating Mona Lisa's image to suit their own aesthetic. Replicating Renaissance masterpieces continues to be a way for aspiring artists to perfect their painting techniques and prove their skills.
Here below is a chronology of fictional and semi-fictional stories that revolve, either wholly or partially, around the famous Mona Lisa, a portrait of Lisa del Giocondo painted by Leonardo da Vinci during the Renaissance in Florence. The years listed on the left refer to the year of release of these works of fiction.
The Prado Mona Lisa is a painting by the workshop of Leonardo da Vinci and depicts the same subject as Leonardo da Vinci's better known Mona Lisa. While the painting is held by the Louvre Museum, Paris, it has been displayed in the Museo del Prado in Madrid, Spain since 1819, but was considered for decades a relatively unimportant copy. However, after its restoration in 2012, the Prado's Mona Lisa was claimed to be the earliest known studio copy of Leonardo's masterpiece.
Jean-Pierre Isbouts is a professor in the Social Sciences PhD program of Fielding Graduate University in Santa Barbara, California, and an author, screenwriter, director, and producer of works addressing various historical periods, particularly the time period of Jesus and that of Renaissance and post-Renaissance art.
The two-Mona Lisa theory is a longstanding theory proposed by various historians, art experts, and others that Leonardo da Vinci painted two versions of the Mona Lisa. Several of these experts have further concluded that examination of historical documents indicates that one version was painted several years before the second.
The Mona Lisa Myth is a multimedia project consisting of a 2013 book and a 2014 documentary film, produced in tandem by Renaissance scholar and art historian Jean-Pierre Isbouts, with physician and art collecter Christopher Heath Brown as co-author of the book and as a producer of the documentary, the latter with narration by Morgan Freeman. The book and film each examine the history of the Mona Lisa, and the longstanding theory that the Isleworth Mona Lisa is an earlier version of the same painting, also by Leonardo da Vinci.
Vincent Delieuvin is a French author and art historian specializing in the work of Leonardo da Vinci, and in Italian paintings of the sixteenth century, generally. Since 2006, he has worked as a heritage curator at the Louvre museum.