Saving Mona Lisa

Starred review from October 15, 2018
Decades after WWII, we are still learning about the courage of those who fought to defend the free world. Those heroes include the men and women of France's Mus�e Nationaux (French National Museums), who risked not only their jobs but sometimes their very lives to save and protect the nation's artistic heritage. Their efforts saved some 3,600 paintings as well as thousands of antiquities, objets d'art, sculptures, and engravings that they evacuated from the Louvre and stored in a system of depots throughout the country. Some works were moved many times. Da Vinci's masterpiece, the Mona Lisa, had its own specially constructed, velvet-lined case placed inside a nondescript wooden crate and travelled eight times. Incredibly, when the Louvre's Grande Galerie reopened in 1947, every priceless treasure was back in place, except, as Chanel wryly notes, one mummified sheep. The efforts of this army of curators, art historians, museum directors, archivists, volunteers, and museum staff achieved the goal described by Rose Volland, volunteer staff member at the Jeu de Paume Museum, as saving a little of the beauty of the world. Chanel's history is a work of substance and scholarship that should be part of every art history collection and required reading for anyone who cares about Western civilization.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2018, American Library Association.)