The 1911 Theft of the Mona Lisa
How a stolen painting became the most famous in the world
Image: Wikimedia Commons (public domain)
On the morning of 21 August 1911, the Mona Lisa vanished from the walls of the Louvre. For twenty-eight months it was gone — and in its absence it became an icon.
On a quiet Monday, when the Louvre was closed to the public, Vincenzo Peruggia lifted Leonardo's portrait from its hooks, removed it from its frame in a stairwell, and walked out with it hidden beneath his clothes. The theft was not even noticed for more than a day; a visitor asking to see the painting alerted staff to the empty space on the wall.
The investigation was a public spectacle. The poet Guillaume Apollinaire was arrested and briefly implicated; he in turn cast suspicion on his friend Pablo Picasso, who was questioned by police. Newspapers printed the painting's image on front pages across the world, and crowds queued to stare at the vacant space where it had hung — the absence itself had become the attraction.
Peruggia kept the painting in a trunk in his Paris apartment. In late 1913 he traveled to Florence and offered it to the dealer Alfredo Geri, claiming he wished to repatriate a stolen national treasure. Geri and the director of the Uffizi authenticated it and alerted the authorities. Peruggia was arrested, and the recovered Mona Lisa toured Italy before returning to Paris in triumph.
The episode marked a turning point in the culture of museums and celebrity. A well-known Renaissance portrait had been transformed, by its theft, into the single most recognizable object in Western art.