The theft that made the Mona Lisa famous
One August morning in 1911, an Italian glazier took the painting off the wall and walked out with it hidden under his smock. For more than two years the whole world searched for the Mona Lisa, and it was this theft that made it the most famous painting on earth.
On Monday 21 August 1911, the Louvre was closed to the public, as it was every Monday. In the Salon Carré, a man in a white smock, like those worn by the museum’s workmen, took down a small painting on wood, removed it from its frame in a service staircase and left with it hidden under his clothes. Nobody noticed a thing. The Mona Lisa had just vanished.
An absence noticed the next day
It was only on the Tuesday that a painter who had come to copy works in the Salon Carré was surprised to find four empty hooks where the painting should have been. The staff first assumed it had been taken away to be photographed. It took several hours to understand. The alarm was raised, the museum closed, the borders watched. The press seized on the affair, first in France, then all over the world.
The suspects
The investigation stalled. Among those questioned were the poet Guillaume Apollinaire, briefly jailed, and the young Pablo Picasso, interviewed by police, because of an earlier affair involving statuettes stolen from the Louvre by an acquaintance of theirs. Both were cleared. Meanwhile, crowds flocked to the Louvre to gaze at… the empty space where the painting had hung.
Two years later
In December 1913, a Florentine art dealer received a letter from a man claiming to have the Mona Lisa and wishing to return it to Italy. A meeting was arranged in a Florence hotel. The director of the Uffizi accompanied the dealer. The man took the painting out of a trunk with a false bottom. It was genuine.
The thief was Vincenzo Peruggia, an Italian glazier who had worked at the Louvre, including fitting protective glass over some paintings. He knew the premises, the hours and the staff’s habits. He claimed he wanted to return to Italy a masterpiece he believed Napoleon had stolen, which was false: Leonardo had brought it to France himself, and the painting was later acquired by François I.
Before being returned to France, the Mona Lisa was exhibited for a few days in Florence, then in Rome and Milan, before immense crowds. She returned to the Louvre in January 1914 and was welcomed like a celebrity.
The birth of an icon
Before 1911, the Mona Lisa was considered a masterpiece, but one among many in the Louvre’s collections. The theft, and the enormous press coverage that came with it, turned it into a global icon. Her face was reproduced in newspapers worldwide, on postcards, in caricatures. A few years later Marcel Duchamp drew a moustache on her, and the painting entered popular culture for good.
Today
The Mona Lisa hangs in the Salle des États, behind protective glass, opposite an immense canvas by Veronese, The Wedding at Cana, which most visitors do not even look at. A small tip: turn around. You will see one of the greatest paintings in the Louvre, with almost no one in your way.
A painting was stolen. A legend was returned.
