The Mona Lisa Vanishes: List 1

by Nicholas Day
This nonfiction narrative traces how Leonardo da Vinci's 16th-century painting of an ordinary Italian wife and mother became the most recognizable face in the world.

This list covers "A Star is Born"–"She's Gone."

Here are links to our lists for the book: List 1, List 2, List 3, List 4, List 5
40 words 313 learners

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Full list of words from this list:

words only definitions & notes
  1. intriguing
    capable of arousing interest or curiosity
    Imagine a woman: intriguing, unknown, beautiful. Make her a model.
  2. notary
    someone legally empowered to witness signatures and certify documents
    Born into a long line of notaries—an early version of a lawyer—the man should have gone into the family business. Being a notary may have been the most boring profession in Renaissance Italy, but it was steady.
  3. ingenious
    showing inventiveness and skill
    Instead, he designed flying machines. He dissected dead bodies. He inflated pig bladders and launched them around the room. He was an extraordinary, ingenious, wondrously weird man.
    He was Leonardo da Vinci.
  4. dowry
    money brought by a woman to her husband at marriage
    Her family hadn’t had enough money for a dowry, the sum any girl in Florence needed for a marriage, and girls without dowries disappeared into convents, cut off from the world.
  5. commission
    place an order for
    There were children, and there was money—enough money to commission a painting.
  6. pillage
    steal goods; take as spoils
    We do know that afterward, the woman staring out of the painting—Lisa Gherardini—will watch as the city around her is invaded and pillaged.
  7. palatial
    relating to or being a large and stately residence
    With every monarch, the palace grew yet more palatial, sprouting vast wings and pavilions like some sort of fantastical beast.
  8. fundamental
    being or involving basic facts or principles
    The changes have been blindingly fast. New inventions like automobiles and airplanes are a blur on the street and in the sky. Their speed is altering fundamental facts of life—things as basic as time and space.
  9. sensation
    a state of widespread public excitement and interest
    A local story—the story of a criminal at loose in the Louvre, for example—can now become a global sensation.
  10. curator
    the custodian of a collection, as a museum or library
    The museum was closed on Mondays, but it wasn’t abandoned. The staff still came in: curators, cleaners, maintenance workers.
  11. sublime
    worthy of adoration or reverence
    On the wall, the painting was sublime. Off the wall, it was agony.
  12. canvas
    a piece of canvas cloth prepared as the surface for a painting
    Painted not on canvas but on wood, surrounded by an antique frame and glass, the whole thing weighed in at almost two hundred pounds.
  13. heist
    the act of stealing
    The theft of the Mona Lisa was the greatest heist in art history. Every heist that followed—every stolen painting—was an imitation.
  14. bravado
    a swaggering show of courage
    Not an imitation of the strategy, or the craft, or the luck, but an imitation of the sheer bravado: the idea of stealing something that couldn’t possibly be stolen.
  15. assumption
    a hypothesis that is taken for granted
    But it is also the story of another way of looking at the world—clearly, plainly, without assumptions or expectations. It’s the story of how Leonardo da Vinci looked at the world.
  16. maintenance
    activity involved in keeping something in good working order
    The footsteps were from a crew of workmen—the men who were supposed to be in white smocks. They walked toward the Salon Carré, where the head of the crew—the head of all maintenance at the Louvre—stopped his men.
  17. pivotal
    being of crucial importance
    It was a pivotal moment. The painting had been gone less than an hour, maybe even less than a few minutes. Time was precious. The thief might have still been in the Louvre.
  18. stuffy
    excessively conventional or narrow-minded and hence dull
    They’d taken a job at the Louvre because it was the stuffiest place in Paris. Nothing would happen there, and after nothing happened for long enough, they’d retire.
  19. conservative
    resistant to change
    Louis Béroud did not value new ideas. He was a conservative man who valued tradition, and he painted traditionally.
  20. depiction
    representation by drawing, painting, etc.
    Béroud specialized in lovingly detailed depictions of the Louvre.
  21. intimacy
    a feeling of being close and belonging together
    Louis Béroud despised the glass. He felt it destroyed the intimacy of the Louvre. For Béroud, the glass was a problem, not a solution, and on this Tuesday morning, he was planning a painting that would mock it.
  22. antiquity
    an artifact surviving from the past
    Paupardin ran to the person unfortunate enough to now be in charge—the curator of Egyptian antiquities, a man named Georges Bénédite.
  23. dignified
    formal or stately in bearing or appearance
    The dignified French museum was about to be reduced to the status of a laughingstock.
  24. persistence
    steady determination
    The Mona Lisa was gone for over twenty-four hours before anyone realized it was gone. If not for the persistence of Louis Béroud, it might have been days.
  25. acquire
    win something through one's efforts
    A legend in his own time, he was the sort of man who acquired multiple nicknames: the Pooh-Bah of Paris, the Little Man with a Big Stick, the Little King.
  26. decree
    issue an authoritative order
    He once decreed that no man taller than five feet seven could be a detective in Paris—and that no man shorter than five feet nine could be a constable, a street officer.
  27. inconspicuous
    not prominent or readily noticeable
    Lépine’s theory was that detectives should be inconspicuous, and police officers who walked the street should be conspicuous.
  28. canvass
    consider in detail in order to discover essential features
    Meanwhile, the Paris police canvassed the museum for clues. They found nothing until an antique frame and a glass box were discovered in a stairwell near the Salon Carré.
  29. perpetrator
    someone who commits wrongdoing
    “So far, we have not the slightest clue as to the perpetrator of the crime.”
  30. inexplicable
    incapable of being explained or accounted for
    Paris was a city of newspapers, and the shocking news was in every hand, on every newsstand, across every front page. The same words, over and over again, in extremely large letters:
    INIMAGINABLE
    INEXPLICABLE
    INCROYABLE
  31. staggering
    so surprisingly impressive as to stun or overwhelm
    The story had everything. An unimaginable theft. A criminal mastermind—and it had to be a criminal mastermind, because who else could steal a painting that couldn’t be stolen? A beautiful woman. A genius. A painting worth a sum too staggering to estimate.
  32. throng
    press tightly together or cram
    They thronged the street outside the museum just to be close to where the Mona Lisa used to be.
  33. transcendent
    exceeding or surpassing usual limits
    It was a transcendent painting.
    Over the next month, it was transformed into a painting that was beloved by all, that spoke to everyone, that moved everyone. In fact, it became less a painting and more an object of worship.
  34. audacious
    not held back by conventional ideas of behavior
    “What audacious criminal,” asked the magazine L’Illustration, “what mystifier, what manic collector, what insane lover, has committed this abduction?”
  35. insistent
    demanding attention
    Each day, the headlines got more insistent and more outraged.
  36. upheaval
    a state of violent disturbance and disorder
    They didn’t care if their stories were true. Not especially. They cared if they made good copy.
    There was a lot of good copy. The world was in upheaval.
  37. noxious
    injurious to physical or mental health
    Smell the air instead. It’s rank. It’s toxic. This smell is actually good, by Parisian standards. A few decades before, there were truly noxious episodes known as “the Great Stinks.”
  38. relentless
    never-ceasing
    It’s hard to figure out what the present is like when nothing will hold still long enough to let anyone figure it out. The world is in relentless motion.
  39. perspective
    appearance as determined by distance from the viewer
    Here, an artist named Pablo Picasso is tearing up the idea of perspective, the geometric rules governing the paintings that hang in the Louvre.
  40. cubism
    an artistic movement featuring surfaces of geometric planes
    All the advancements of art and science—electricity, the internal combustion engine, the theory of relativity, cubism—had to be explained, and even then they often didn’t make sense.
Created on Fri Jan 19 10:43:42 EST 2024 (updated Mon Jan 22 10:00:54 EST 2024)

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