The Mona Lisa has no price. It belongs to the French state, whose heritage law treats the collections of national museums as public property, so no sale price exists. The only number ever attached to it is $100 million, set in 1962 for a trip to America and worth about $1 billion today.
That sum still sits in the Guinness World Records as the highest insurance valuation ever given to a painting. It is more than twice the $450.3 million Christie's got for Leonardo's own Salvator Mundi in New York on 15 November 2017.
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That $100 million was never insured. The Guinness entry that still carries the figure says so itself: for the Mona Lisa's trip, insurance was not concluded.
The trip began with a request. Jacqueline Kennedy told André Malraux, France's minister of culture, "I would love to see the Mona Lisa again and show her to the Americans." On 14 December 1962 the painting left the Louvre, and the figure was written down that same day. Then nobody signed a policy.
A number nobody paid to insure is a number nobody ever had to defend. It has survived for more than sixty years without anyone asking what it measured.
Who named the $100 million figure?
Nobody on record. The Guinness entry gives the sum, the date, 14 December 1962, and the purpose: the move of the painting for an exhibition that ran until 12 March 1963. It names no appraiser and no insurer.
The occasion explains the size. The Mona Lisa sailed on the S.S. France and reached New York on 19 December. In January 1963 it was unveiled at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, where 518,525 people came to see it before it closed on 3 February.
Then it went to the Metropolitan Museum in New York. One day there brought a record 63,675 visitors, and about a million came in all.
A painting that has never been on the market has no price to insure against. I read the sum as a declaration more than a calculation, and the Louvre had found a cheaper way to protect her.
What You'll Discover
What the Louvre bought instead.
Who really owns her.
What is actually on that panel.
What one thief did to her value.