21 August 1911: The Mona Lisa Is Stolen from the Louvre
On the morning of August 21, 1911, an Italian handyman named Vincenzo Peruggia committed what would become one of the most famous art thefts in history: he walked out of the Louvre Museum in Paris with Leonardo da Vinci Mona Lisa hidden under his coat. The theft would transform the relatively obscure Renaissance portrait into the most famous painting in the world, a status it maintains to this day.
Peruggia had worked at the Louvre and was familiar with the museum layout and security procedures. On that Monday morning, when the museum was closed to the public, he hid inside overnight and emerged the next day. He removed the painting from the wall, took it to a nearby stairwell, removed it from its protective glass case and frame, concealed it under his worker smock, and simply walked out of the museum. The theft was not discovered until the following day when an artist came to the museum to sketch the painting and found only four iron pegs where the Mona Lisa had hung.
The disappearance of the painting caused an international sensation. French borders were closed, and ships and trains were searched. The police questioned numerous suspects, including Pablo Picasso and poet Guillaume Apollinaire, who was actually arrested and jailed for a week. Rewards were offered, and theories abounded about who might have taken the masterpiece. Some believed it was a publicity stunt by the museum, while others suspected wealthy American collectors or German agents trying to humiliate France.
For more than two years, the painting remained hidden in a trunk in Peruggia apartment in Paris. His motivations remain somewhat unclear, though he later claimed he wanted to return the painting to Italy, believing incorrectly that Napoleon had stolen it. In November 1913, Peruggia contacted an art dealer in Florence, offering to sell the Mona Lisa for 500,000 lire. When he brought the painting to the dealer gallery, the police were waiting.
Peruggia was arrested but received a relatively light sentence of just over a year in prison, reduced on appeal to seven months. Many Italians hailed him as a patriot who had tried to return Italian cultural heritage to its homeland. The Mona Lisa was displayed in Italy briefly before being returned to France, where it was greeted with enormous fanfare and crowds eager to see the famous stolen painting.
The theft had an unexpected consequence: it made the Mona Lisa a global icon. Before 1911, it was admired by art historians but was not particularly well-known to the general public. The sensational coverage of its theft and recovery, combined with the mystery surrounding Leonardo enigmatic subject, transformed it into the most recognized painting in the world. Today, the Mona Lisa attracts approximately 10 million visitors annually to the Louvre, where it hangs behind bulletproof glass, protected by some of the most sophisticated security measures in any museum.
