WORD LISTS

"The Mona Lisa Vanishes" by Nicholas Day, List 1

Fri Jan 19 10:43:42 EST 2024
By Vocabulary.com (NY)Visual Thesaurus Moderator
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
intriguing
Imagine a woman: intriguing, unknown, beautiful. Make her a model.
notary
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.
ingenious
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.
dowry
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.
commission
There were children, and there was money—enough money to commission a painting.
pillage
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.
palatial
With every monarch, the palace grew yet more palatial, sprouting vast wings and pavilions like some sort of fantastical beast.
fundamental
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.
sensation
A local story—the story of a criminal at loose in the Louvre, for example—can now become a global sensation.
curator
The museum was closed on Mondays, but it wasn’t abandoned. The staff still came in: curators, cleaners, maintenance workers.
sublime
On the wall, the painting was sublime. Off the wall, it was agony.
canvas
Painted not on canvas but on wood, surrounded by an antique frame and glass, the whole thing weighed in at almost two hundred pounds.
heist
The theft of the Mona Lisa was the greatest heist in art history. Every heist that followed—every stolen painting—was an imitation.
bravado
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.
assumption
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.
maintenance
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.
pivotal
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.
stuffy
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.
conservative
Louis Béroud did not value new ideas. He was a conservative man who valued tradition, and he painted traditionally.
depiction
Béroud specialized in lovingly detailed depictions of the Louvre.
intimacy
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.
antiquity
Paupardin ran to the person unfortunate enough to now be in charge—the curator of Egyptian antiquities, a man named Georges Bénédite.
dignified
The dignified French museum was about to be reduced to the status of a laughingstock.
persistence
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.
acquire
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.
decree
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.
inconspicuous
Lépine’s theory was that detectives should be inconspicuous, and police officers who walked the street should be conspicuous.
canvass
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.
perpetrator
“So far, we have not the slightest clue as to the perpetrator of the crime.”
inexplicable
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
staggering
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.
throng
They thronged the street outside the museum just to be close to where the Mona Lisa used to be.
transcendent
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.
audacious
“What audacious criminal,” asked the magazine L’Illustration, “what mystifier, what manic collector, what insane lover, has committed this abduction?”
insistent
Each day, the headlines got more insistent and more outraged.
upheaval
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.
noxious
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.”
relentless
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.
perspective
Here, an artist named Pablo Picasso is tearing up the idea of perspective, the geometric rules governing the paintings that hang in the Louvre.
cubism
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.

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