At the end of 1962, France is about to lend the Mona Lisa to the United States. The painting will be shown in Washington and then in New York, in the winter of 1963.
Before it leaves, it is given a value: one hundred million dollars. No one will buy it, no one will sell it. What, then, is this figure for?
insurance value set before the journey, a Guinness World Record for a painting
An insurance value is the sum an insurer would have to pay if the object were lost. It says nothing about what a buyer would offer.
An insurance value is set for one specific case: damage. It does not have to be confirmed by a sale.
Here, the insurance was not even taken out: the premium would have cost more than the maximum security measures, which were chosen instead. The figure stayed, and has been quoted ever since as if it were a market price.
Real scarcity is complete: the painting is unique, and Leonardo da Vinci left fewer than twenty attributed paintings (an indicative order of magnitude). But uniqueness does not make a price: every unique work is unique.
What sets the Mona Lisa apart is perceived scarcity, that is, the attention it gathers: around ten million people file past it each year (indicative figure, before the pandemic).
Reading: a price is born when a buyer and a seller meet. When one of the two sides cannot exist, what remains is an assessment. Indicative diagram.
A single chain, with no known break: Leonardo takes it to France, Francis I becomes its owner, the Crown keeps it until the Revolution, and the painting enters the Louvre in 1797. The collections of the musées de France owned by a public body are inalienable: the law forbids selling them.
This chain was recently challenged: on 14 May 2024, the Conseil d'État rejected a petition from an association that wanted Francis I's acquisition declared non-existent, and fined it €3,000. The court did not rule on the merits: it dismissed the claim as manifestly inadmissible.
On 21 August 1911, the Mona Lisa vanishes from the Louvre. Vincenzo Peruggia, a workman who had worked on the painting's glass case, takes it.
For more than two years the painting stays hidden, and he cannot manage to sell it. He finally offers it to the director of the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, saying he is returning to Italy what belongs to it.
He is arrested; the painting is shown in Florence, then returned to the Louvre in January 1914. Out of the State's hands, it had no price.
The story is perfectly coherent, but it is about fame more than about the object. The smile, the mystery, the parodies by Duchamp and then Warhol, the crowds of 1963: everything feeds a celebrity that adds nothing to the painting itself.
Here the story is the cause of perceived scarcity, not its consequence. That is a first limit to place on the price.
Prior existence is the strongest in the whole series. A note dated October 1503, written by Agostino Vespucci, a friend of Leonardo, and found in Heidelberg, attests that Leonardo was then painting the portrait of Lisa del Giocondo. To this is added an unbroken trail of inventories.
Perfect prior existence gives certainty, not a price. Nothing is missing from this file, except the chance to turn it into money.
The displayed price, one hundred million dollars, measures what the State does not want to risk, not what anyone would pay. The value, for its part, can be read on the four axes without being an amount. The gap therefore lies in the absence of a market.
The flaw in the grid: it can say where value comes from, but not convert it into a price when no one can sell.