The Theft That Made the Mona Lisa Famous
On 21 August 1911 the Mona Lisa disappeared from the Louvre. For more than two years the most famous empty space in Paris drew crowds, and the painting came back a global icon.
Before 1911 the Mona Lisa was admired by artists and connoisseurs, but it was one painting among many in the Louvre. The theft by a former museum worker, and the two years of headlines that followed, changed that.
The painting before the theft
Leonardo da Vinci's portrait of Lisa Gherardini, wife of the Florentine merchant Francesco del Giocondo, is dated about 1503–1519. It is painted in oil on a poplar panel measuring 79 × 53 cm.1 The French king François I acquired it in 1518, and it has belonged to the French collections ever since.1
Monday morning, 21 August 1911
The thief entered the Louvre on the evening of Sunday 20 August and hid overnight in a storage room. Shortly after seven the next morning, dressed in a white work smock like the museum staff, he lifted the painting from the wall of the Salon Carré and carried it to a service staircase.2 There he removed the panel from its protective glass case. A locked door stopped him until a plumber, taking him for a colleague, let him out.2
Nobody noticed for more than a day, because paintings were often taken down to be photographed or cleaned. Only on Tuesday, when a visiting painter asked where it was, did the guards raise the alarm and find the empty glass case in the stairwell.2
Two years of suspects and headlines
In September 1911 the poet Guillaume Apollinaire was arrested over the theft of statuettes from the Louvre, and his friend Pablo Picasso was questioned. Both were cleared.2 When the museum reopened, crowds came to look at the empty space on the wall.2
Vincenzo Peruggia and the trunk in Florence
The thief was Vincenzo Peruggia, an Italian who had worked at the Louvre and had helped build the painting's glass case. Police had questioned him but did not suspect him.2 In late 1913 he wrote to the Florentine dealer Alfredo Geri, offering to bring the painting back to Italy. Geri and Giovanni Poggi, director of the Uffizi, examined it in Peruggia's hotel room, confirmed it was genuine and alerted the police. He was arrested on 11 December 1913.2
Peruggia was sentenced to a year and fifteen days in prison and served about seven months.2 The painting returned to the Louvre in January 1914.2
The value of absence
According to the same account, at least 120,000 people came to see the painting in its first two days back, and it soon appeared in cartoons, advertisements and parodies.2
Our video tells the story of the empty wall, Lisa Gherardini and the theft.
Sources
- 1Portrait of Lisa Gherardini, wife of Francesco del Giocondo, known as the Mona Lisa. Musée du Louvre, Paris
- 2The Heist That Made the Mona Lisa Famous. Evan Andrews, HISTORY, 2016
