Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa is famous because it has been stolen. Twice.
The first theft of the painting was in 1911, when it was snatched from the Louvre in Paris in the middle of the night one Sunday in August.
It took French police more than two years to track it down, and they were so desperate for leads that even Pablo Picasso became a suspect at one point.
After it was recovered in Italy in 1913, the painting was shown to huge crowds in Florence, Milan and Rome on its return trip to Paris, where more than 100,000 people viewed it on its first two days back in the Louvre’s Salon de Carré.
Conspiracy theories about the painting’s theft ran rampant for years after its return. No one seemed to believe that an Italian handyman and his two friends had the ability to simply take a masterpiece off the museum wall and walk out the door undetected.
A 1932 article by Karl Decker in The Saturday Evening Post gave true crime lovers a new tidbit to chew on: an Argentinian con man named Eduardo de Valfierno had supposedly masterminded the heist in order to have six copies of the painting made by expert forger Yves Chaudron. Each of the copy’s owners was led to believe he had the original.
At the World’s Fair in New York City in 1939, France displayed its recovered national treasure for Americans to see firsthand. By the end of the fair, Germans were threatening war, and the French government did not want to risk losing the Mona Lisa a second time.
The Roosevelt administration offered to house the masterwork in America’s new National Gallery in Washington, D.C., where it went on display in 1941.
Just a few months later, German submarines were detected in U.S. coastal waters, and the National Gallery’s most prized works were moved to the Biltmore estate in North Carolina.
And this is where the second theft of the Mona Lisa comes in.
Chattanooga author Daniel D. Smith’s new novel, The Biltmore’s Mona Lisa, is a heist thriller that follows the world’s most famous painting on its new adventure.
German General Hermann Goring learns the Mona Lisa has been moved to the Biltmore estate for safekeeping and sends a team of Luftwaffe officers to America. Their mission is to free a German art expert from a prisoner of war camp and steal the painting, leaving a forgery in its place.
Unbeknownst to the Nazis, a second scoundrel has a similar plan.
“I read about Chaudron’s copies of the Mona Lisa years ago, and it planted the idea for this novel in my mind,” Smith said. “What would have happened if those forgeries turned into a giant shell game with people all over the world, where everyone thought they had the real thing?”
“When I learned that the National Gallery actually used the Biltmore estate to protect works of art during World War II,” he said, “the book was written in my mind.”
Smith and his family have visited Biltmore numerous times over the years, touring the home and grounds and even going behind the scenes to see the inner workings of the estate.
He said it was easy to imagine the story unfolding there, particularly in the Music Room where valuable works of art were concealed behind public-facing walls as other visitors just like Smith toured the home between 1942 and 1944.
While The Biltmore’s Mona Lisa is Smith’s first work of fiction, it is not his first published book.
His expertise in military history led to four nonfiction titles, including The Medal of Honor and the Battles for Chattanooga, inspired in part by his past role as executive director of the National Medal Honor Museum of Military History.
Having served 26 years in the U.S. Navy, Smith said he is most drawn to fiction with a military angle, whether it is American or foreign.
“I find it fascinating to strategize that way, imagining how other officers might approach a situation,” he said. “And it’s fun to think like the bad guy sometimes.”
The Biltmore’s Mona Lisa is available online through Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and the author’s website, danielsmithbooks.net.