Recruiting Football Talk VIII

#11,169
#11,169
August 21, 1911
If you were standing outside the Louvre in Paris on the morning of Aug. 21, 1911, you might have noticed three men hurrying out of the museum.

They would have been pretty conspicuous on a quiet Monday morning, writer and historian James Zug tells weekends on All Things Considered host Guy Raz. "Sunday night was a big social night in Paris," he says, "so a lot of people were hung over on Monday morning."

The men, three Italian handymen, were not hungover. But they might have been a little tired. They'd just spent the night in an art-supply closet.

And on that morning, with the Louvre still closed, they slipped out of the closet and lifted 200 pounds of painting, frame and protective glass case off the wall. Stripped of its frame and case, the wooden canvas was covered with a blanket and hustled off to the Quai d'Orsay station, where the trio boarded a 7:47 a.m. express train out of the city.

They'd stolen the "Mona Lisa."
They were three Italians: two brothers, Vincenzo and Michele Lancelotti, and the ringleader, Vincenzo Perugia. He was a handyman who had worked for the Louvre to install the very same protective glass cases he had ripped from the "Mona Lisa."

Perugia hoped to sell the painting. But the heist had received so much attention that the "Mona Lisa" became too hot to hock, Zug says.
Before its theft, the "Mona Lisa" was not widely known outside the art world. Leonardo da Vinci painted it in 1507, but it wasn't until the 1860s that critics began to hail it as a masterwork of Renaissance painting. And that judgment didn't filter outside a thin slice of French intelligentsia.

"The 'Mona Lisa' wasn't even the most famous painting in its gallery, let alone in the Louvre," Zug says.

Dorothy and Tom Hoobler wrote about the painting's heist in their book, The Crimes of Paris. It was 28 hours, they say, until anyone even noticed the four bare hooks.

Twenty-eight months after he snatched it from the Louvre, Perugia finally made a pass at selling the "Mona Lisa" to an art dealer in Florence.

But the dealer was suspicious. He had the head of an Italian art gallery come take a look at the painting.

A stamp on the back confirmed its authenticity.

"They said, 'OK, leave it with us, and we'll see that you get a reward,'" Tom Hoobler says. Perugia went back home. But half an hour later, to his surprise, the police were at his door.

"He said later that he was trying to return it to Italy — that he was a patriot and it was stolen by Napoleon — and he was trying to return it to the land of his birth," James Zug says.

And so, with much fanfare, the painting was returned to the Louvre. Perugia pleaded guilty to stealing it, and was sentenced to just eight months in prison.

But a few days after his trial, Dorothy Hoobler says, World War I broke out. Suddenly, the drama of an art heist was off the front pages.

"This seemed like a very small story," she says.



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#11,172
#11,172
SugarCC said:
I'm all for a good beer; but, NEVER over a good whisky.
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Beer will make you fat but get you a pleasant buzz and like wine has the benefit of being slow enough for you to know you should stop (you might not heed you body and brain's advice but you almost always know with either one that one more is gonna be too much). Whiskey will murder your liver before you realize you have a buzz and trust me this is not a death you want to go through let alone put your family through. Wine you can drink all day with not much negative effect as long as you're not chugging it. I have never been a fan of any hard liquor beyond the occasional drink on special occasions. It's just too easy to do damage before you realize what you've done or to get far more intoxicated than you ever intended. I also think it's much more likely to lead to genuine alcohol problems. Nothing wrong with the occasional sip if you like it but it's just so much harder on the body.
 
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#11,174
#11,174
Jackcrevol said:
the amalgamation.

truthfully the monster and Shelley would have never worked out cause she Gotthic.
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therickbol said:
You don't think the person who created the monster is in fact, himself, a monster?!?!?
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Yes, the monster was essentially Frankenstein, what was inside of him...the monster was the physical manifestation.

"See, the metaphors and symbology, digging to the root meaning of what the true statement of Shelley's masterpiece is..."

Trying to act and sound snooty, discussing "the classics".

I'll show myself out...
 
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#11,175
#11,175
SugarCC said:


Yes, the monster was essentially Frankenstein, what was inside of him...the monster was the physical manifestation.

"See, the metaphors and symbology, digging to the root meaning, of what the trumestatement of Shelley's masterpiece is..."

Trying to act and sound snooty, discussing "the classics".

I'll show myself out...
Click to expand...

i'm aware dear
 
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