The Fine Detectives

The Fine Detectives

The Fine Detectives is an art crime podcast that explores the perfect crimes around art and how they happened. Cases range from solved to cold cases, historical to modern-day events, and fictional and nonfiction. Your co-hosts are amateur art enthusiasts who discuss these crazy and creative crimes over coffee or wine. We invite you to review, rate, and share this podcast with friends, family, and random strangers you pass by (6ft apart of course).

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  1. 04.02.2021

    Mona Lisa Smile

    We are going to kick this first episode off with one of the first great art heists of all time. Go big or go home? This has everything. It has your twist and turns, the interest, the crime, the revenge. I would say it should be a movie but it probably already is. Today we are going to talk about...the Mona Lisa. When people hear that name, they know exactly who that is and who the artist is. It’s so iconic in pop culture and just general history. It wasn’t always like that though. There was a time when not as many people knew who or what she was. So who is she? Mona Lisa is an infamous painting by the infamous Italian artist Leonardo Davinci. The Mona Lisa now is worth almost $2.5 billion but when she was an infant, it wasn’t as much. Leonardo created the Mona Lisa in 1503. Since Napoleon seized the painting for a collection, it’s been at the Louvre in Paris since 1797. The Mona Lisa is one of the most recognized paintings in the world, the most expensive, and the most reproduced on shirts and the likes. Our heist begins on August 21, 1911, at the Louvre in Paris. It’s Monday. The museum is closed that day and only opened to staff members. The Mona Lisa is hanging in the Denon Alley on the first floor. Staff members start coming in around 7 am and notice it hanging on its iron rigs in the French collection but around 8:30 am, someone, notices that it’s missing. You would think someone would do something, but this was ignored only because it’s not uncommon for paintings to go missing for a day like for photographs, being fixed, repaired, etc. The person who first notices that it’s missing is a tourist artist who comes to the Louvre and paints famous artworks: the Mona Lisa was the subject that day. He asks the security where it is and they’re like...it’s not there? That’s when panic sets in. Once they conclude it’s not being photographed or anything like that, they close the museum and turn the sirens on. They still have no idea when it was seen last the French police are also wondering what to do. The Louvre deputy director called on the French police since this is a missing painting and had been gone for maybe 24 hours. Someone said it was like kidnapping the Queen of England. It’s nearly impossible to do. The French police call in a friend. This is *the* friend: Louis Jean-Baptiste Lépine. Lepine was basically the French sherlock holmes. He’s about facts and quick thinking and analysis. Lepine was also known for being the detective to use fingerprints in an investigation first. The first thing they needed to do was just get the word out. The museum was still closed and they needed leads. The media gets a hold of this story and back in the early 1900s it’s all about sensationalism news. Also, the Washington Post printed the wrong picture to go with their Mona Lisa missing headline. That just goes to show that it wasn’t the well known though. More can be viewed directly on our website, www.thefinedetectives.com

    45 Min.

Info

The Fine Detectives is an art crime podcast that explores the perfect crimes around art and how they happened. Cases range from solved to cold cases, historical to modern-day events, and fictional and nonfiction. Your co-hosts are amateur art enthusiasts who discuss these crazy and creative crimes over coffee or wine. We invite you to review, rate, and share this podcast with friends, family, and random strangers you pass by (6ft apart of course).