LEONARDO'S CRUCIFIXION STOLEN
5 Million Masterpiece Vanishes from Louvre Official Paris, by all accounts, was in uproar. The hapless director of the Louvre had been recalled from a UNESCO conference in Brasilia and was now on the carpet at the Blys6e Palace, reporting personally to the President, the Deuxime Bureau had been alerted, and at least three ministers without portfolio had been appointed, their political futures staked to the recovery of the painting. As the President himself had remarked at his press conference the previous afternoon, the theft of a Leonardo was an affair not only for France, but for the entire world, and in a passionate plea he enjoined everyone to help effect its speedy return (despite the emotionally charged atmosphere, cynical observers noticed that this was the first crisis of his career when the Great Man did not conclude his peroration with 'Vive La France').
My own feelings, despite my professional involvement with the fine arts - I was, and am, a director of Northeby's, the world-famous Bond Street auctioneers - by and large coincided with those of the general public. As the taxi passed the Tuileries Gardens I looked out at the crude halftone illustrations of da Vinci's effulgent masterpiece reproduced in the newspapers, recalling the immense splendour of the painting, with its unparalleled composition and handling of chiaroscuro, its unsurpassed technique, which together had launched the High Renaissance and provided a beacon for the sculptors, painters and architects of the Baroque.
Despite the two million reproductions of the painting sold each year, not to mention the countless pastiches and inferior imitations, the subject matter of the painting still retained its majestic power. Completed two years after da Vinci's Virgin and St Anne, also in the Louvre, it was not only one of the few Leonardos to have survived intact the thousand eager hands of the retouchers of four centuries, but was the only painting by the master, apart from.the dissolving and barely visible Last Supper, in which he handled a composition with a large landscape and a huge gallery of supporting figures.
It was this latter factor, perhaps, which gave the painting its terrifying, hallucinatory power. The enigmatic, almost ambivalent expression on the face of the dying Christ, the hooded serpentine eyes of the Madonna and Magdalene, these characteristic signatures of Leonardo became more than mere mannerisms when set against the huge spiral concourse of attendant figures that seemed to swirl up into the distant sky across the Place of Bones, transforming the whole image of the crucifixion into an apocalyptic vision of the resurrection and judgment of mankind. From this single canvas had come the great frescoes of Michelangelo and Raphael in the Sistine Chapel, the entire schools of Tintoretto and Veronese. That someone should have the audacity to steal it was a tragic comment on mankind's respect for its greatest monuments.
And yet, I wondered as we arrived at the offices of Galleries Normande et Cie in the Madeleine, had the painting really been stolen at all? It's size, some 15 feet by 18 feet, and weight - it had been transferred from the original canvas to an oak panel - precluded a single fanatic or psychopath, and no gang of professional art thieves would waste their time stealing a painting for which there would be no market.
Could it be, perhaps, that the French government was hoping to distract attention from some other impending event, though nothing less than the re-introduction of the monarchy and the coronation of the Bourbon Pretender in Notre Dame would have required such an elaborate smokescreen.
At the first opportunity I raised my doubts with Georg de Stael, the director of Galleries Normande with whom I was staying during my visit. Ostensibly I had come to Paris to attend a conference that afternoon of art dealers and gallery directors who had also suffered from thefts of major works of art, but to any outsider our mood of elation and high spirits would have suggested some other motive. This, of course, would have been correct. Whenever a large stone is cast into the turbid waters of international art, people such as myself and Georg de Stael immediately take up our positions on the bank, watching for any unusual ripple or malodorous bubble. Without doubt the theft of the Leonardo would reveal a good deal more than the identity of some crack-pot cat burglar. All the darker fish would now be swimming frantically for cover, and a salutary blow had been struck at the official establishment of senior museum curators and directors.
Such feelings of revenge obviously animated Georg as he moved with dapper, light-footed ease around his desk to greet me. His blue silk summer suit, well in advance of the season, glittered like his smooth brilliantined hair, his svelte rapacious features breaking into a smile of roguish 'My dear Charles, I assure you, categorically, the confounded picture has actually gone -' Georg shot out three inches of elegant chalk-blue cuff and snapped his hands together '- puff! For once everyone is speaking the truth.
What is even more remarkable, the painting was genuine.'
'I don't know whether I'm glad to hear that or not,' I admitted. 'But it's certainly more than you can say for most of the Louvre - and the National Gallery.'
'Agreed.' Georg straddled his desk, his patent leather shoes twinkling in the light. 'I had hoped that this catastrophe might induce the authorities to make a clean breast of some of their so-called treasures, in an attempt, as it were to dispel some of the magic surrounding the Lconardo. But they are in a complete fuddle.'
For a moment we both contemplated what such a sequence of admissions would do to the art markets of the world - the prices of anything even remotely genuine would soar - as well as to the popular image of Renaissance painting as something sacrosanct and unparalleled. However, this was not to gainsay the genius of the stolen Leonardo.
'Tell me, Georg,' I asked. 'Wtho stole it?' I assumed he knew.
For the fa'st time in many years Georg seemed at a loss for an answer. He shrugged helplessly. 'My dear Charles, I just do not know. It's a complete mystery. Everyone is as baffled as you are.'
'In that case it must be an inside job.'
'Definitely not. The present crowd at the Louvre are beyond reproach.' He tapped the telephone. 'This morning I was speaking to some of our more dubious contacts -Antweiler in Messina and Kolenskya in Beirut - and they are both mystified. In fact they're convinced that either the whole thing is a put-up affair by the present regime, or else the Kremlin itself is involved.' 'The Kremlin?' I echoed incredulously. At the invocation of this name the atmosphere heightened, and for the next half an hour we spoke in whispers.
The conference that afternoon, at the Palais de Chaillot offered no further clues. Chief Detective-Inspector Carnot a massive gloomy man in a faded blue suit, took the chair, flanked by other agents of the Deuxime Bureau. All of them looked tired and dispirited; by now they were having to check up on some dozen false alarms each hour. Behind · them, like a hostile jury, sat the sober-faced group of investigators from Lloyds of London and Morgan Guaranty Trust of New York. By contrast, the two hundred dealers and agents sitting on the gilt chairs below the platform presented an animated scene, chattering away in a dozen languages and flying a score of speculative kites. After a brief resumé, delivered in a voice of sepulchral resignation, Inspector Carnot introduced a burly Dutchman next to him, Superintendent Jurgens of the Interpol bureau at The Hague, and then called on M. Auguste Pecard, assistant director of the Louvre, for a detailed description of the theft. This merely confirmed that the security arrangements at the Louvre were first-class and that it was absolutely impossible for the painting to have been stolen. I could see that Pecard was still not entirely convinced that it had gone.'… the pressure panels in the floor surrounding the painting have not been disturbed, nor have the two infrared beams across its face been broken. Gentlemen, I assure you it is impossible to remove the painting without first dismantling the bronze frame. This alone weighs eight hundred pounds and is bolted into the wall behind it. But the electric alarm circuit which flows through the bolts was not interrupted… '