The Mona Lisa Vanishes Quotes

“Leonard da Vinci had painted the Mona Lisa.
But Vincenzo Perugia had turned it into The Mona Lisa.”
― Nicholas Day, The Mona Lisa Vanishes: A Legendary Painter, a Shocking Heist, and the Birth of a Global Celebrity

“It’s no longer good-natured or innocent. It’s mysterious, alluring, unknowable. It’s a puzzle of a portrait.”
― Nicholas Day, The Mona Lisa Vanishes: A Legendary Painter, a Shocking Heist, and the Birth of a Global Celebrity

“In a conspiracy theory, belief matters more than facts. Belief in a conspiracy inevitably leads you away from the facts.”
― Nicholas Day, The Mona Lisa Vanishes: A Legendary Painter, a Shocking Heist, and the Birth of a Global Celebrity

“It was a very hard needle to thread.”
― Nicholas Day, The Mona Lisa Vanishes: A Legendary Painter, a Shocking Heist, and the Birth of a Global Celebrity

“Leonardo is later—some five hundred years later—called the most relentlessly curious man in history.”
― Nicholas Day, The Mona Lisa Vanishes: A Legendary Painter, a Shocking Heist, and the Birth of a Global Celebrity

“If the Mona Lisa is the most famous face in art history, Les Demoiselles is a hatchet thrown at it. It's not a pretty painting. Its brutal and uncomfortable.”
― Nicholas Day, The Mona Lisa Vanishes: A Legendary Painter, a Shocking Heist, and the Birth of a Global Celebrity

“Word of his midnight activities gets out. 'The pope has found out that I have skinned three corpses,' Leonardo writes in his notebook.
He gets off easy. He's simply told: please stop skinning corpses.”
― Nicholas Day, The Mona Lisa Vanishes: A Legendary Painter, a Shocking Heist, and the Birth of a Global Celebrity

“The Lourve, he concluded, with an insult designed to puncture French pride, "is less well protected than a Spanish museum.”
― Nicholas Day, The Mona Lisa Vanishes: A Legendary Painter, a Shocking Heist, and the Birth of a Global Celebrity