The Day the Mona Lisa Walked Out of the Louvre

On the morning of Monday, August 21, 1911, the Louvre was closed to the public for cleaning. Vincenzo Peruggia — a 30-year-old Italian decorator who had briefly worked at the museum building protective cases for paintings — walked into the Salon Carré in a workman's smock, lifted the Mona Lisa off four iron pegs, removed it from its glass case in a stairwell, wrapped it in the smock, tucked it under his arm, and walked out through a service door a plumber had unlocked for him.

The theft was not noticed until Tuesday morning, when the painter Louis Béroud arrived to copy the Mona Lisa and found a blank wall. The Louvre closed for a week. Paris police questioned 60 employees and, briefly, both Pablo Picasso and the poet Guillaume Apollinaire — Apollinaire had previously called for the Louvre to be burned down. Both were released.

Peruggia kept the painting in a false-bottomed trunk in his boarding-house room for two years and three months. In 1913 he took it by train to Florence and offered to sell it to the gallery owner Alfredo Geri, claiming he was repatriating it from a Napoleonic theft. (Leonardo himself had brought the painting to France in 1516.) Geri and the Uffizi's Giovanni Poggi authenticated it, then called the police. Peruggia got seven months. Parts of the Italian press treated him as a patriot.

The painting was already well known to art professionals before 1911. After it came back, it was famous in the way only a stolen-and-recovered object can be: every newspaper in Europe and America had run a photograph of a face the average reader had never previously needed to know.