The Theft That Made the Mona Lisa Famous

The most reproduced face in the Louvre became famous by disappearing. On Monday, 21 August 1911, a workman who had helped fit the Mona Lisa’s protective glass case lifted the painting off its wall in the Salon Carré and carried it out of the museum. It stayed missing for 28 months, and by the time it came back, a portrait respected by critics had become a popular icon known far beyond the art world.

The Louvre’s own catalogue entry puts the outcome plainly, as summarised in the museum’s collection records: the theft gave the work a fame that was worldwide and, above all, popular, and after 1913 it became the Louvre’s principal masterpiece. The painting itself did not change in those two years. The headlines did the work.

A respected painting, not yet a popular one

The Mona Lisa is Leonardo da Vinci’s portrait of Lisa Gherardini, the wife of the Florentine merchant Francesco del Giocondo. It is a small work, oil on a poplar panel measuring 77 by 53 centimetres, generally dated to between about 1503 and 1519, and it now hangs behind protective glass in the Louvre’s Salle des États. Small size matters to this story: one man could carry it.

Before 1911, its reputation was real but narrow. Art critics had been calling it one of the finest examples of Renaissance painting since the 1860s, yet, as historian James Zug wrote in Smithsonian Magazine, that judgment had not filtered beyond a thin slice of the intelligentsia. In his 1878 guidebook to Paris, the travel writer Karl Baedeker gave the portrait a paragraph. By the 1907 edition he had cut it to two sentences, far less than he gave other Louvre landmarks such as the Nike of Samothrace and the Venus de Milo. At the time of the theft, Zug notes, the Mona Lisa was far from the most visited item in the museum.

It was, however, valued enough to worry about. A letter mailed to the Louvre from Vienna in 1910 threatened the painting, and the museum hired the glazier firm Cobier to put a dozen of its more prized paintings under glass. The job took three months. One of the workmen assigned to it was Vincenzo Peruggia, an Italian handyman from a village north of Milan who had settled in Paris. He had handled the Mona Lisa’s new case himself, and he knew how the painting hung and how light the panel was.

Monday morning: four pegs and a white smock

The Louvre was closed to visitors on Mondays. On the morning of 21 August 1911, Peruggia entered in the white smock museum workmen wore, went to the Salon Carré, and lifted the panel off the four iron pegs that held it to the wall, between a Correggio and a Titian. On a nearby service staircase he stripped away the frame and the glass case, left them behind, and walked out of the building with the bare panel.

Nobody raised the alarm that day. The absence was found the next morning, when the painter Louis Béroud arrived to copy the portrait and found a bare wall instead. Accounts differ on the exact count, putting the delay at a little more than a day; the museum at first had to rule out the ordinary explanation that the painting had been taken down to be photographed. Once the theft was confirmed late on Tuesday, the Louvre closed for a week while police searched the building.

The investigation then went confidently in the wrong direction. Officers interrogated Peruggia in November 1911, as they did other Louvre workmen, and accepted his story that he had overslept on the morning in question and learned of the theft from the newspapers. The painting was, at that moment, hidden in the false bottom of a wooden trunk in his boardinghouse room. Police attention fell instead on the poet Guillaume Apollinaire, who was arrested in September 1911 and held for a week, and on his friend Pablo Picasso, who was brought in for questioning. Both were cleared. The two men had a connection to a separate thief who had taken small sculptures from the Louvre, which was enough to draw suspicion and not enough to hold it.

The empty wall becomes the attraction

What happened next is the part of the story that explains the painting’s modern fame. Newspapers around the world ran the theft under banner headlines. Wanted posters for the painting went up on Parisian walls. When the Louvre reopened after its week of closure, thousands of spectators filed into the Salon Carré to stare at the empty wall and its four iron hooks. The writer Franz Kafka and his travelling companion Max Brod were among them; they noted the bare spot and later attended a vaudeville show making fun of the theft.

Satirical postcards, a short film, and cabaret songs followed. Smithsonian’s account describes the shift directly: popular culture seized on the theft and turned high art into mass art. People who had never thought about Renaissance portraiture now knew this one’s face, its name in two languages, and the shape of the space where it should have been. The crowd was not drawn by the painting’s quality, which most of them had never seen up close. It was drawn by the absence.

Peruggia, meanwhile, discovered that fame made the painting unsellable. A stolen picture nobody recognises can be traded quietly. A stolen picture on every front page cannot. He kept it in the trunk and waited.

Two years in a trunk, then Florence

In December 1913, after 28 months, Peruggia took the painting by train to Florence and tried to sell it to the art dealer Alfredo Geri. Geri brought in Giovanni Poggi, the director of the Uffizi Gallery, who authenticated the panel as the original. Peruggia was arrested on 12 December 1913.

His stated motive, in his own account and at his trial, was patriotic: he said he wanted to return the painting to Italy, the country of Leonardo’s birth. Zug’s Smithsonian account notes that Peruggia had connections in criminal circles and had hoped to sell or trade the painting before it became too well known to move. Both things can sit in the same file: the court heard the patriotic defence, and he pleaded guilty and served eight months in prison.

Before it went home, the recovered painting was shown in Florence, Milan, and Rome, to large crowds. It returned to the Louvre at the start of January 1914, and in the first two days after it was rehung in the Salon Carré, more than 100,000 people came to see it. The painting now draws its crowds behind protective glass, in the museum’s largest room, as the work the Louvre itself calls its principal masterpiece.

Fact, claim, and legend

Because the desk separates documented fact from the stories that gather around a famous object, three layers are worth keeping apart:

• Documented: the dates and mechanics above — the closed Monday, the four pegs, the week-long closure of the museum, the November 1911 interrogation, the Florence recovery in December 1913, the Italian exhibition tour, and the January 1914 return — are consistent across the Louvre’s collection summary, Smithsonian Magazine’s account, and NPR’s reporting.
• His claim: the patriotic motive was Peruggia’s own stated reason, repeated at trial. It explains what he said. It does not, on its own, settle why he kept the painting for 28 months or why he approached a dealer with it.
• Legend: a durable later story holds that a swindler commissioned copies and sold them to buyers who each believed they owned the original. It comes from a 1932 Saturday Evening Post article by the journalist Karl Decker, and, as Smithsonian notes, there is no supporting historical evidence for it. It is a good story. It is not a documented one.

Bottom line

The Mona Lisa’s fame is usually told as a story about a smile. The record tells a plainer one: a small, portable panel; a workman who knew its case from the inside; a museum that did not notice for a day; and a new mass press that turned an empty wall into an attraction in its own right. Leonardo supplied the painting. The theft of 1911, and the two years of headlines that followed, supplied the audience.