Poggi’s role received less contested recognition. His professional reputation as the man who authenticated the painting — the expert eye that confirmed, in a hotel room in Florence, that the object in Peruggia’s trunk was genuine — was secure regardless of the reward dispute. His subsequent career, including his wartime work saving Florence’s art treasures, confirmed the judgment of those who had turned to him in December 1913.
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## What the Trunk Concealed: The Physical Condition of the Painting
When Giovanni Poggi examined the Mona Lisa in Room 20 of the Hotel Tripoli-Italia on December 10 or 11, 1913, he was looking at a painting that had spent twenty-eight months in hiding. The conditions of its storage — in a trunk, in a Paris apartment, without climate control, humidity regulation, or the other environmental protections that conservators consider essential — were the opposite of what the painting required for long-term preservation.
That the painting emerged from its concealment in apparently good condition was partly luck and partly a function of what it is. The Mona Lisa is painted on poplar wood panel, which is relatively stable as a substrate compared to canvas but is susceptible to warping and to changes in humidity. The paint layers on top of it, applied in Leonardo’s sfumato technique through many thin applications, are potentially vulnerable to environmental fluctuation.
The conservators and curators who examined the painting after its recovery found it, by most accounts, in better condition than might have been expected from its period of uncontrolled storage. The specific details of the examination — what was checked, what was found, what interventions if any were made before the painting was returned to public display — are not fully documented in sources available to general audiences, and the painting’s condition report from that period is not publicly detailed.