Napolitano on the theft of the Mona Lisa

Mona Lisa – an influential painting

“I hate art”. “That is quite a strong statement darling, why have you broken with art at such an early stage in your life?” “Well, we have this assignment to describe how we feel about the Mona Lisa and quite frankly I don’t feel anything. To me it just looks like an average portrait. I really don’t understand all the fuss about it.” “I do not blame you my darling, I was never the artistic type myself but the Mona Lisa really is a very influential painting. Actually, you might even say that it had an impact on my personal life.

This has nothing to do with smile though. For me, as Secretary of Homeland Security, the Mona Lisa, or more specifically the theft of the painting in 1911, made way to the mean of identifying people we use today: The fingerprinting system. Its predecessor, Bertillonage, worked quite differently. In Bertillonage, which was invented in the 19^th century by the Frenchman Alphonse Bertillon, several distinctive body features, like width of head or length of right ear, were measured and catalogued. So when a criminal was caught his body measurements were compared to those in the catalogue in the hope of getting a match. This system contained a number of flaws, for example were the measurements often inexact as every officer took them a lit bit differently.

 Critcs’ voices rose but it was the theft of our lovely smiling lady that was the undoing of Bertillonage. As the theft had caused a public uproar and one conspiracy theory chased the other the government wanted the case resolved as soon as possible. Bertillon was personally summoned to the crime scene and even managed to secure a fingerprint. He and his colleagues engaged in seven months of comparing I with thousands of data cards but found no match.

When the painting was finally regained two years later it turned out that the thief had actually beenin Bertillone’s files all along. They just could not find a match because it was the left thumbprint that was left on the crime scene and the right one that was in the files. Needless to say, this incident caused the police to rethink their tactics.