Hit Makers: Why Things Become Popular

by Derek Thompson

Today there is little doubt about the rarefied air of Leonardo da Vinci’s portrait. The Mona Lisa is the world’s most treasured painting, literally: It holds the Guinness World Record for the most expensive insurance policy on any art piece. In 1973, the art critic Kenneth Clark called the Mona Lisa the “supreme example of perfection,” saying it deserved its title as the most famous painting in the world. But in the nineteenth century, it wasn’t even the most famous painting in its museum, the Louvre in Paris. The historian Donald Sassoon reported that, in 1849, the Mona Lisa was valued at 90,000 francs. That’s a tidy sum, but not even close to Titian’s Supper at Emmaus (150,000 francs at the time) or Raphael’s The Holy Family (600,000 francs), which hung in the same museum. The Mona Lisa’s fame got an assist from a dim-witted thief. On August 11, 1911, a Monday, Vincenzo Peruggia, an unemployed Italian painter, walked into the Louvre and left with the Mona Lisa. French newspapers were aghast at the theft and indignantly proclaimed the painting’s historic significance. The Mona Lisa went missing for several years, until Peruggia—stuck with an expensive artwork whose sale would inevitably lead to his apprehension—tried to hawk the painting in Florence and was duly apprehended. The recovery of the Mona Lisa and its return to France was an international sensation. Several years after the painting’s recovery, in 1919, the modernist Marcel Duchamp made a replica of the Mona Lis...