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Comment by devindotcom | Hacker News Reader

I've always loved this quote: "What audacious criminal, what mystifier, what maniac collector, what insane lover, has committed this abduction?"

Though Peruggia claims he did it out of patriotism, I've always nursed the theory that, during its absence, the original was used as reference to create several extremely good fake versions. These could be sold as the original, since everyone knew it had been stolen, and each would think they had the real one. Then the original is returned, and the buyers are without recourse. What are you going to do, tell the police? And of course Peruggia et al would say nothing.

I suspect this isn't true, but the fun part is that it could be and no one would ever know. So I'm choosing to believe it is so.

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Your post reminds me of the very underrated latest film from Orson Well, F for Fake, which is about forgery. It contains an excellent quote from Elmyr de Hory, a notorious art forger, who at some point exclaims: "Guilty? Of what? Making masterpieces?".

I watched it recently, interesting film for sure. In his Cape Era.

The details of the crime seem to point to something like this.

Remember that Picasso was questioned and probably involved. One theory is that what we think is the original is, in fact, a master-copy by Picasso. The original is held privately in Florence.

Unfortunately (for a fun theory), carbon dating and x-rays of the Mona Lisa have disproved that.

There's a reason why you have connoisseurs. You can fool carbon dating by using materials from that time. I'll have to look into the x-rays and what they show, but it can be quite hard to prove art authentic with scientific methods alone.

It'd make a lot more sense to fake the black market copies you actually make money off of.

Unless you wanna keep the original for yourself too

That doesn't seem very smart.

Carbon dating was developed ~30 years after the panting was recovered.

So, the idea someone was going to the effort to use at the time 400 year old material to fool a test nobody knew as even possible, just doesn’t fit.

They wouldn’t be able to do much with an oil painting. Any old drying oil from that time period would have long ago polymerized and carbon isotopes in any new oil used to mix the pigments would be a dead giveaway.

He said the thief returned the original. The copies would have (supposedly) sold to people who wouldn't be able to complain without incriminating themselves.

I was referring to the commenter’s second idea that perhaps the Mona Lisa on display today is a copy. Alas, the truth is less interesting.

I like this approach to epistemology :) Imagine how many what-ifs it could turn up if automated & applied across the corpus of knowledge (scientific & otherwise) :) We'd have Pepe Silvio on steroids, and that I'd like to see =)

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