On the morning of Monday 21 August 1911 the Louvre was closed for its weekly maintenance day, and a man in the white smock worn by museum workmen lifted the soon-to-be most famous painting on earth off its four iron pegs. Vincenzo Peruggia, a twenty-nine-year-old Italian glazier and decorator, knew the routine intimately: he had worked in the museum, and by most accounts had helped fit the very glass-fronted case that was supposed to protect the Mona Lisa. He carried the panel into a service stairwell, stripped away the frame and case, wrapped Leonardo's poplar board under his smock, and walked out of the largest palace in Europe. When a locked door briefly blocked his exit, he simply unscrewed the doorknob. Nobody stopped him. Nobody even asked what he was carrying.
More remarkable still, nobody noticed. The painting's absence went unremarked for more than twenty-four hours, because guards assumed it had been taken to the photographers' studio, a routine occurrence. Only on the Tuesday, when the painter Louis Béroud set up his easel in the Salon Carré and asked where the picture was, did staff check and find nothing but four iron pegs. The Louvre shut for a week, borders and ports were watched, and dozens of investigators combed the building, turning up the abandoned frame on a staircase. When the museum reopened, Parisians queued in their thousands to stare at the empty space on the wall — a blank patch drawing bigger crowds than the painting itself ever had, with mourners leaving flowers as if at a funeral.
The investigation slid into farce. Police jailed the poet Guillaume Apollinaire for nearly a week, because a former secretary of his had once stolen Iberian statuettes from the Louvre, and hauled in his friend Pablo Picasso for questioning; both men were released, badly shaken. Peruggia himself was interviewed twice as a former museum workman, and twice waved away after his lodgings were only cursorily searched. All the while the panel lay a short walk from the Louvre, hidden in a trunk with a false bottom in his rented room on the rue de l'Hôpital-Saint-Louis.
Two years in a trunk
In late 1913 a Florentine art dealer named Alfredo Geri received a letter signed “Leonardo”. The writer offered to bring the Mona Lisa home to Italy in exchange for 500,000 lire, framed as expenses and patriotic reward rather than ransom. Geri and Giovanni Poggi, director of the Uffizi, met Peruggia in his Florence hotel room in December 1913, watched him pull the panel from under a false-bottomed trunk lid, matched the Louvre's inventory seals on the back, and quietly called the police. The hotel where the handover happened later renamed itself La Gioconda in gratitude.
At trial in Florence, Peruggia cast himself as a patriot repatriating what Napoleon had plundered. The history was against him: Leonardo himself carried the portrait over the Alps, and King Francis I of France acquired it after the painter died at Amboise in 1519 — though Napoleon did, in fairness, hang it in his bedroom at the Tuileries for a few years. Italian sympathy was real all the same. Peruggia was sentenced to a year and fifteen days, cut on appeal to roughly seven months, most of it already served. Before going home the painting made a farewell tour of Florence, Rome and Milan under escort, and re-entered the Louvre in January 1914 to scenes of national relief.
The making of an icon
Before the theft, the Mona Lisa — Leonardo's portrait, begun around 1503, of Lisa Gherardini, wife of the Florentine silk merchant Francesco del Giocondo, hence La Gioconda in Italian and La Joconde in French — was a treasure prized by connoisseurs and Romantic critics, not a household image. Two years of front pages, wanted posters and music-hall songs changed that permanently: the world learned the painting's face by its absence. Celebrity brought celebrity's hazards. In 1956 the picture was attacked twice, once with acid and once with a thrown rock, which is why it now sits behind heavy protective glass; in 1963 it toured Washington and New York at Jacqueline Kennedy's urging, and in 1974 Tokyo and Moscow, drawing queues measured in miles. Peruggia went to his grave believing he had tried to give Italy back a masterpiece. What he actually did was stranger: by taking the painting away, he gave the whole world its icon.
Quiz nuggets
- Vincenzo Peruggia, a former Louvre workman, stole the Mona Lisa on 21 August 1911, and the theft went unnoticed for over 24 hours.
- The poet Guillaume Apollinaire was jailed and Pablo Picasso questioned during the investigation; both were innocent.
- The painting was recovered in Florence in December 1913 after Peruggia offered it to dealer Alfredo Geri; he served only about seven months.
- The sitter was Lisa Gherardini, wife of silk merchant Francesco del Giocondo — hence the names La Gioconda and La Joconde.
- Napoleon never looted the painting: Leonardo brought it to France himself, and Francis I acquired it after the artist's death in 1519.