AUTHOR’S NOTE

I started this book with the intention of writing a history of the triumphant American exhibition of Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa. Early into my research, however, I discovered a surprise: First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy had been the mastermind behind the 1963 exhibition, which was made possible only through her alliance with National Gallery Director John Walker and her adept international diplomacy.

Sent as a personal loan to the President and Mrs. Kennedy by the French government, the famous painting arrived in the States on December 19, 1962, where it was exhibited in Washington, D.C., and New York for fifty-two days. Nearly two million Americans, for many their first visit to an art museum, stood in long lines for a chance to see a masterpiece created in the early sixteenth century. As if engaged in a religious pilgrimage, visitors traveled great distances and waited for hours, ready to embrace the Mona Lisa, a harbinger of a transcendent new era.

The visit of the Mona Lisa produced the greatest outpouring of appreciation for a single work of art in American history and pioneered the phenomenon of the blockbuster museum show. It was one of the most daring, elaborate art exhibitions ever staged, and the painting’s unlikely, romantic journey to America captured the imagination of the world.

What follows is a true story. The principal events take place over the course of two years beginning in March 1961 and ending in the spring of 1963. Jacqueline Kennedy mustered the full force of her influence as First Lady to bring the Mona Lisa to America, all the while drawing on her innate understanding of symbols and image crafting to infuse the exhibition with a sense of history, drama, and pageantry. The Mona Lisa’s controversial visit also served vital national interests at a decisive moment in U.S. history, and “La Joconde,” as the painting is known in France, was transformed into an icon of freedom at the height of the Cold War.

The painting’s successful debut awakened a passion for culture that had been dormant in the national psyche during the provincial postwar years, and the sensational exhibit ignited a national love affair with the arts. In his emotional speech at the closing ceremony at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, John Walker acknowledged that the great achievement of the exhibit was not how many people came to see the Mona Lisa, but rather that the painting acted as a catalyst. Her visit, he said, “stirred some impulse toward beauty in human beings who may never have felt that impulse before.”