In 1963, the painting was sent to the United States for a brief tour arranged through the diplomatic efforts of French President Charles de Gaulle and President John F. Kennedy. It was displayed at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. and at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Approximately 40,000 people per day visited the Washington venue during the exhibition. The tour, the largest public visitation event the painting had experienced to that point, deepened its American celebrity substantially.
A 1974 tour to Japan similarly drew enormous crowds and extended the painting’s reach to East Asian audiences for whom it had not previously been a central cultural reference.
By the late twentieth century, the Mona Lisa had achieved a level of global recognition that is essentially without precedent in the history of art. It is reproduced everywhere: in advertising, in parody, in clothing, in everyday references. The image of the woman with the ambiguous smile is recognizable to people who have never visited a museum, read an art history textbook, or encountered any other work by Leonardo.
The theft of 1911 was not the only factor in this transformation. The painting’s artistic qualities, its pre-existing reputation among connoisseurs, the mythologizing of Leonardo in the Romantic era, the mass reproduction technologies of the twentieth century, the 1963 and 1974 tours — all of these contributed. But the two-year absence, and the story of recovery that brought it back, gave the painting a biographical dimension that most artworks lack. It had been somewhere dangerous. It had been found. The person who took it was not an art thief of exceptional sophistication but an ordinary man with a trunk and a misguided story he told himself about his own motives.