Mona Lisa had closed. Peruggia was an Italian patriot who believed Leonardo's painting should have been returned for display in an Italian museum. Peruggia may have been motivated by an associate whose copies of the original would significantly rise in value after the painting's theft. A later account suggested Eduardo de Valfierno had been the mastermind of the theft and had commissioned forger Yves Chaudron to create six copies of the painting to sell in the U.S. while the location of the original was unclear. However, the original painting remained in Europe. After having kept the "Mona Lisa" in his apartment for
The Fifer The Fifer The Fifer or Young Flautist is a painting by French painter Édouard Manet, made in 1866. It is usually kept in the Musée d'Orsay, Paris, and is now on loan to the Louvre Abu Dhabi museum in Abu Dhabi, UAE. On a trip to Spain in 1865, Édouard Manet visited the Prado, where the art of Diego Velázquez was a revelation. Upon his return to Paris in 1866, he began work on a new painting, depicting an anonymous regimental fifer of the Spanish army. In this picture, Manet presents the uniformed boy, in a manner that imitates and