A second document, from an Austrian museum near Altaussee dated 12 December 1945, states that "the Mona Lisa from Paris" was among "80 wagons of art and cultural objects from across Europe" taken into the mine. Image credit: AFP/Getty Images. In February 1943, the Mona Lisa was moved again to its final wartime hiding space, the Château de Montal in southwestern France. Tue 12 Nov 2013 12.15 GMT In November of 1939, the Mona Lisa was transported from Chambord to the château of Louvigny, the northernmost art depot where the large-format paintings were stored, to keep it out of reach of the advancing German army. Another document, dated December 12, 1945, reads “the Mona Lisa from Paris [is included in] 80 wagons of art and cultural objects from across Europe”. Unbeknownst to them, the Mona Lisa was in the apartment, stashed in a trunk. The new European data protection law requires us to inform you of the following before you use our website: We use cookies and other technologies to customize your experience, perform analytics and deliver personalized advertising on our sites, apps and newsletters and across the Internet based on your interests. The Mona Lisa was not one of them. A new documentary tells the story of an extraordinary rescue mission. Among the many enduring mysteries of this period is the fate of the world’s most famous painting.
See our, Read a limited number of articles each month, You consent to the use of cookies and tracking by us and third parties to provide you with personalized ads, Unlimited access to washingtonpost.com on any device, Unlimited access to all Washington Post apps, No on-site advertising or third-party ad tracking. The Louvre later altered its story, claiming that the version of the Mona Lisa that had been returned from the mine was an excellent copy, not by da Vinci, but painted within a generation of his death. The most famous theft of works of art in history, when the most famous painting in the world was stolen – Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa, took place on August 21, 1911. Less well-known is the work done before the war to keep one of the greatest collections of art and artifacts in the world—the Louvre Museum's in Paris—out of Nazi hands in the first place.
However, there is no record of the painting actually being part of the stolen art collected and stored by the Nazi.
On 5 June 1940, it was transferred to Chauvigny on a cushioned stretcher in the back of an ambulance, which had been sealed to keep the humidity constant (the official who accompanied the painting arrived nearly asphyxiated from the lack of circulation in the sealed vehicle). A curator sat next to it in a state of cat-like readiness for the entire trip, and later reported the lack of air circulation almost suffocated him. The announcement of the theft took over the international media which accused the museum of lack of security. The painting only "seems" to have been found there because contradictory information has come down through history, and the Mona Lisa is not mentioned in any wartime document, Nazi or allied, as having been in the mine. There the Mona Lisa arrived on October 3, 1940, and stayed for just over two years in the former residence of the bishops of Montauban. The museum had seen some rough treatment during the war: The Germans had kept it open, its galleries mainly empty except for some lesser pieces fished out of storage and boxes of looted artworks from Jewish private collections that were stashed in the museum before transport to Germany. A report of the Operation Ebensburg stated that four Austrian double-agents managed to save some of the famous works hidden in the mine and that among those objects was the Louvre’s Mona Lisa. The Mona Lisa was actually stolen in 1911, in one of the cleverest art heists ever pulled. Whether it may have been at Altaussee was a question only raised when scholars examined the postwar Special Operations Executive report on the activities of Austrian double agents working for the allies to secure the mine. Since near-identical copies of Leonardo's painting exist, it would have been strategically advisable that one be placed in that specially-marked wooden crate labelled "Mona Lisa", and shipped for storage while the original was craftily hidden away. Available for everyone, funded by readers, Family of Fritz Salo Glaser, who escaped deportation during Dresden bombing, had feared artworks were destroyed, Vase of Flowers by Jan van Huysum was stolen by Nazis during second world war, Forty-two institutions have identified items that were taken from Jewish families, Almost 600 works of art discovered in Munich apartment of Cornelius Gurlitt may have been stolen by Nazis.
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