On the morning of Monday, August 21, 1911, the Louvre was nearly empty. Monday was the museum's weekly closing day, so the guards were relaxed and the galleries were quiet. A stocky Italian man in a plain white smock, the same kind every Louvre workman wore, walked into the Salon Carré, lifted a small wooden panel off four iron wall hooks, and carried it out under his arm. Nobody stopped him. Nobody even looked twice.
That panel was the Mona Lisa. It stayed missing for more than two years, and almost everyone involved in finding it made a mistake along the way, including the thief. Here's what actually happened.
The bare wall in the Salon Carré, photographed shortly after the theft was discovered in 1911. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
Who stole the Mona Lisa?
A 30-year-old Italian glazier named Vincenzo Peruggia. He'd moved from a village in the Alps to Paris in 1908 and picked up short-term work at the Louvre building glass cases for the museum's most valuable paintings. One of the cases he helped construct was the very shadow-box frame bolted to the wall around the Mona Lisa. Months later, he used what he'd learned building that case to take the painting apart himself and walk off with it.
How did he get a masterpiece past the guards?
He counted on the museum's own routine. Monday mornings were reserved for cleaning staff, so a man in a workman's smock raised no questions. Peruggia lifted the panel off its four wall hooks, ducked into a service stairwell known to staff as the Sept Mètres, and stripped away the ornate frame and the glass case, leaving both propped against the wall. He wrapped the bare wood panel in his smock and tucked it under his arm. His only real snag was a locked door between the stairwell and the street. He waited a few minutes; a passing locksmith, assuming he was a fellow employee, opened it for him without a second glance.
Why did it take the Louvre a full day to notice?
The theft wasn't even reported until the next morning, when a painter named Louis Béroud arrived to set up his easel in the Salon Carré and found bare wall where the portrait should have been. Staff first assumed it had simply been taken away to be photographed. A year earlier, the Louvre's director, Théophile Homolle, had waved off the very idea of a theft, joking that stealing the Mona Lisa would be like stealing the towers of Notre-Dame. He was on holiday when it happened and was forced to resign soon after.
Why did police arrest Pablo Picasso?
Not because they suspected him of taking the Mona Lisa itself. Weeks into the investigation, a small-time thief named Géry Piéret confessed in a Paris newspaper that he'd been stealing ancient Iberian statues from the Louvre's storerooms for years, and that he'd sold two of them to a young, still mostly unknown painter named Pablo Picasso. Police traced Piéret back to his former employer, the poet Guillaume Apollinaire, who happened to be Picasso's closest friend. Under pressure to show progress, they arrested Apollinaire on September 7 and held him at La Santé prison for four days. Picasso was brought in for questioning too, reportedly terrified he'd be deported to Spain. Both men were cleared and released once it was obvious neither had anything to do with the missing painting.
Didn't police already have his fingerprints on file?
They did, and it still didn't help. Peruggia had an earlier, unrelated arrest on record, and his prints were filed with Alphonse Bertillon, the Paris police's pioneering identification expert. Investigators lifted a clean thumbprint off the glass case Peruggia had discarded in the stairwell. The trouble was that Bertillon's system only filed right-hand prints, and the print left on the glass was from Peruggia's left thumb. Officers even visited his apartment twice during the investigation and interviewed him directly. Neither time did they consider him a serious suspect.
Vincenzo Peruggia's 1909 police photograph, taken two years before he stole the Mona Lisa. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
Where did he hide the world's most famous painting?
In his own one-room apartment on the outskirts of Paris, inside a wooden trunk with a false bottom, for more than two years. By some accounts of the investigation, a detective once sat at Peruggia's table writing up notes with his elbow resting inches from the hiding place. The Mona Lisa never left that trunk until Peruggia decided, on his own, to move it.
What finally gave him away?
Money, dressed up as patriotism. In December 1913, Peruggia carried the panel by train to Florence and wrote to a well-known local art dealer, Alfredo Geri, offering to sell "the stolen Mona Lisa" under the alias Leonardo. He told Geri and the Uffizi's director, Giovanni Poggi, that he wanted to return the painting to Italy, insisting Napoleon had looted it (he hadn't; the Mona Lisa left Italy legally, brought to France by Leonardo himself). Poggi authenticated the panel against the Louvre's own records, and the two men quietly alerted police, who arrested Peruggia at his hotel.
Was he punished for the theft?
Lightly. At his 1914 trial in Florence, a court-appointed psychiatrist gave Peruggia a riddle he answered incorrectly, and used it, along with sympathy for his stated motive, to argue he was of diminished capacity. Judges sentenced him to one year and fifteen days; he served seven months before an appeal cut it short. He later fought in the Italian army during World War I, spent two years as a prisoner of war, and eventually returned to Paris, where he worked quietly as a house painter under his birth name until his death in 1925.
Did the theft actually make the Mona Lisa famous?
Yes, more than any single event before or since. Before 1911, art historians admired the Mona Lisa, but ordinary museum-goers had plenty of other Salon Carré paintings competing for their attention. The two-year disappearance put it on front pages worldwide, and when it resurfaced, crowds numbering in the tens of thousands lined up in Florence, Rome, and Milan just to see it before it returned to the Louvre on January 4, 1914. That's the real reason tourists now form a scrum around one painting instead of spreading out across the room: the Mona Lisa didn't just survive being stolen. It became famous because of it.
Old master portraits like this one are still what a lot of people picture when they hear "fine art," even if the closest most of us get is a framed poster rather than a heist. If that classic, painterly look is your thing, Meron's academic art prints channel some of that same old-world weight.
