The second mechanism was the power of absence. The empty wall at the Louvre, which became a destination in its own right, inverted the normal relationship between artwork and audience. People came to look at where something had been. The painting’s presence in absence — the vivid sense that something irreplaceable was missing — made it emotionally real to people who had never seen it in person. Loss sharpens value in ways that possession does not always do.
The third mechanism was the subsequent exhibition circuit. The Italian displays in Florence and Rome before the painting’s return to France drew enormous crowds. The return to the Louvre in January 1914 was a cultural event. When more than 120,000 people came to see the painting in the first two days after its return to public display at the Louvre, they were coming to see not simply a great painting but a painting that had been somewhere else and come back — a painting with a story that most of them had been following for two years.
The fourth mechanism was the cultural commentary the theft generated. Artists, writers, and intellectuals produced work in response to the theft, the investigation, and the recovery. Marcel Duchamp’s 1919 altered reproduction of the painting — *L.H.O.O.Q.*, the postcard with a mustache and goatee drawn on the sitter’s face — was a direct response to the painting’s new hypercelebrity. By parodying the most famous painting in the world, Duchamp was using its fame as an artistic material. That the parody became itself famous is testimony to how thoroughly the Mona Lisa had, by 1919, become the reference point for the very idea of a famous painting.