Albrecht Gaiswinkler
Albrecht Gaiswinkler( 29 October 1905 – 11 May 1979) was an Austrian civil servant, social democrat( SPÖ) politician and resistance fighter, who, some believe, saved the Mona Lisa from destruction in an Austrian salt mine towards the end of World War II.
Gaiswinkler was born in Bad Aussee, Austria.
In 1934, he was a political prisoner for some months.
In 1944, while serving with the German Wehrmacht in France, he deserted and joined the Maquis, bringing with him four trucks of arms and ammunition and 500,000 francs.
When the U.S. Third Army liberated Alsace in September 1944, he gave himself up to them( along with 17 German prisoners).
He then went to work for the British Special Operations Executive and, in 1945, he was parachuted back into the Aussee area with three colleagues: Valentin Tarra, Johann Moser and Hans Renner.
The Germans had pillaged a huge number of European art treasures during the Nazi period, and many had been stored in the Altaussee salt mine near Gaiswinkler's home town of Bad Aussee.
After being dropped into the local area, Gaiswinkler raised a force of around 300 men and armed them with captured German weapons.
He spent the last weeks and months of the war harassing local German forces.
When the Americans arrived, his information helped them capture several eminent Nazis.
He and his colleagues had captured the salt mine, prevented the destruction of the artworks held there and were able to hand over a number of Nazi treasure hoards, including the Mona Lisa and the Austrian Imperial Crown Jewels.
Other artworks rescued included the Ghent Altarpiece.
The administrators of the Louvre have stated that the Mona Lisa was kept in France during the Second World War, but that it is possible that a 15th- or 16th- century copy of the Mona Lisa was held in Austria.
After the war, Gaiswinkler was a SPÖ member of the Austrian Parliament from 1945 to 1949.
He died in Bad Aussee in 1979.
Devorah Sperber
Devorah Sperber is an American installation artist known for creating works out of spools of thread, chenille pipe cleaners and map tacks that act as optical illusions.
Some of her work has involved using thousands of spools of thread to create pixilated versions of iconic works of art by famous artists.
Her naming scheme for these works generally follows the format" After[ Artist]/[ Work]".
For example, her creation of the" Mona Lisa" using spools of thread is titled" After The Mona Lisa 2".
The spools are hung in long, adjacent columns to create a pointillist, inverted abstraction of a famous painting.
When viewed by the naked eye, they are barely recognizable.
When viewed through an optical device, usually a" viewing sphere"( a transparent sphere the size of a baseball) placed several feet in front of the spools), the abstractions are inverted and shrunk into a remarkably detailed and faithful image of the original painting.
The resulting image is usually distorted the way objects are distorted when viewed through a fisheye lens: objects in the center are larger than they appear, and objects in the periphery are smaller than they appear.
The horizon of the image viewed through the viewing sphere also bend and curve, depending on the viewer's perspective.
Sperber has wittily used the fish eye; in her rendering of the Mona Lisa, the Mona Lisa's" elusive smile appears, changes, and disappears in a dramatic and humorous fashion".
Sperber exhibited at the Brooklyn Museum from January 26 to June 17, 2007 and at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art in 2008.
The Mona Lisa Has Been Stolen
The Mona Lisa Has Been Stolen  is a 1966 French comedy film directed by Michel Deville.
Tarot (1986 film)
Tarot is a 1986 West German drama film directed by Rudolf Thome.
It is loosely based on Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's novel" Elective Affinities".
It was entered into the 15th Moscow International Film Festival.
Michel Deville
Michel Deville( born 13 April 1931) is a French film director and screenwriter.
Deville started his filmmaking career in the late 1950s, paralleling the emergence of the French New Wave directors.
He never achieved the level of critical and international recognition of some of his contemporaries such as François Truffaut, Jean- Luc Godard and Claude Chabrol, possibly because of his more conventional filmmaking style.
Nevertheless, his films, especially his comedies from the 1970s and 1980s, were popular in his native France.
One of Deville's comedies," La Lectrice The Reader") was probably his biggest success with international audiences.
" La Lectrice" is about a woman( played by Miou- Miou), who finds work reading novels for the blind but gradually finds herself unwittingly attracting a clientele of fetishists who enjoyed being read to.
At one time his films were difficult to find in North America but presently( 2007) seven of his films are available in DVD in the U.S. His 1980 film" Le Voyage en douce" was entered into the 30th Berlin International Film Festival.
Five years later, his film" Death in a French Garden" was entered into the 35th Berlin International Film Festival.
A clip from his 1968 film Benjamin is included in Robert Bresson ’s Une Femme Douce( 1969).
Rudolf Thome
Rudolf Thome( born 14 November 1939) is a German film director and producer.
He has directed more than 30 films since 1964.
His 1986 film" Tarot" was entered into the 15th Moscow International Film Festival.
The Theft of the Mona Lisa
The Theft of the Mona Lisa( German: Der Raub der Mona Lisa) is a 1931 German drama film directed by Géza von Bolváry and starring Trude von Molo, Willi Forst and Gustaf Gründgens.
It is based on a true story.
The film's sets were designed by the art directors Andrej Andrejew and Robert A. Dietrich.
Lisa del Giocondo
Lisa del Giocondo( née Gherardini; June 15, 1479 – July 15, 1542) was an Italian noblewoman and member of the Gherardini family of Florence and Tuscany.
Her name was given to the" Mona Lisa", her portrait commissioned by her husband and painted by Leonardo da Vinci during the Italian Renaissance.
Little is known about Lisa's life.
Born in Florence and married in her teens to a cloth and silk merchant who later became a local official, she was a mother to five children and led what is thought to have been a comfortable and ordinary middle- class life.
Lisa outlived her husband, who was considerably her senior.
Centuries after Lisa's death, the" Mona Lisa" became the world's most famous painting and took on a life separate from Lisa, the woman.
Speculation by scholars and hobbyists made the work of art a globally recognized icon and an object of commercialization.
In 2005, Lisa was definitively identified as the model for the" Mona Lisa".
Cathy Tyson
Catherine Tyson( born 12 June 1965) is an English stage, film and television actress.
She won the Los Angeles Film Critics Association Award for Best Supporting Actress for the 1986 film" Mona Lisa".
The film also earned her Golden Globe and BAFTA Award nominations.
She has also starred in" The Serpent and the Rainbow"( 1988)," Priest"( 1994), and in the ITV drama series" Band of Gold"( 1995 – 97).
Yves Chaudron
Yves Chaudron was a supposed French master art forger who is alleged to have copied images of Leonardo da Vinci's" Mona Lisa" as part of Eduardo de Valfierno's famous 1911" Mona Lisa" painting theft.
In reality he may be a fictional character created by Karl Decker for an article that ran in a 1932 issue of the" Saturday Evening Post", and passed off as a real person.
There is also very little evidence that Valfierno actually existed, or if he did, that he was involved in the theft of the Mona Lisa at all.

Question: Are the directors of films Tarot (1986 Film) and The Mona Lisa Has Been Stolen both from the same country?
Answer: no