Andrew Lloyd Webber, the composer behind such durable hits as Cats (1981), Phantom of the Opera, and Evita, has teased a new musical about the early 20th century theft of Leonardo da Vinci’s painting, the Mona Lisa. The news was first reported by the British publication The Stage.
Lloyd Webber had already announced he was currently working on a musical based on the 2006 film The Illusionist. Speaking to entertainment journalist Frank DiLella after the April 7 opening of Lloyd Webber’s Cats: The Jellicle Ball on Broadway, the composer told him: “The other one I’m working on is the true story of the theft of the Mona Lisa. It’s a true story about how the Mona Lisa disappeared for three years and ended up in Italy.”
Leonardo started the portrait around 1503 while living in Florence but did not finish it for more than a decade. Early sources, such as 16th-century art historian Giorgio Vasari, claim that is a likeness of Lisa Gherardini, the wife of a Florentine silk merchant Francesco del Giocondo. But the painting never ended up with del Giocondo; some theories suggest Leonardo never actually completed it and that the Mona Lisa is instead a portrait of art patron Isabella d’Este (Isabella Gualanda).
Regardless of who she is, the Mona Lisa is a masterwork, highlighting Leonardo’s signature use of the soft-focus painting technique sfumato and his growing knowledge of human musculature, gained by dissecting corpses in the morgue of the Santa Maria Nuova hospital. “In this work of Leonardo there was a smile so pleasing, that it was a thing more divine than human to behold,” Vasari wrote of the painting. “It was not other than alive.”
The Mona Lisa is now the most famous, and most visited, painting in the world, but this was not the case until she was stolen from the Louvre—which acquired her in 1904—by Louvre employee Vincenzo Peruggia, an Italian patriot who thought it should be returned to Italy. One August day in 1911, Peruggia hid the work under his jacket and walked away with it, spurring a media frenzy and the resignation of the Louvre’s director of paintings.
The case brought a flood of visitors to the Louvre to see the space where the Mona Lisa had hung; postcards of her were printed, and Mona Lisa dolls were made and marketed. Even bigger crowds came to see her when she was recovered two years later, with over 100,000 people viewing her in the first two days alone. By 1914, she was an icon. In 2018 it was said that nine out of ten museumgoers come to the Louvre just to see her.
According to Webber, the musical has yet to be written. As he told DiLella, “More than that [I’m planning it] I cannot really tell you for the simple reason that I’m going away next week to write it.”
