The Theft of the Mona Lisa

The case

On Tuesday 22 August 1911 the painter Louis Béroud set up his easel in the Salon Carré of the Louvre, meaning to paint the room with the Mona Lisa in it. Where the picture should have been there were four iron pegs and a patch of bare wall. The guards first assumed it had gone to the museum's photographers. By late morning it was clear that nobody in the building knew where it was.

It had gone the previous morning. Mondays were the Louvre's closing day, when cleaners, carpenters and contractors had the galleries largely to themselves. Vincenzo Peruggia, a 29-year-old house painter from Dumenza, a village near Lake Maggiore, had worked in the museum for a glazing contractor and had helped fit the glass cases then being added to the most valuable paintings. In the account he later gave Italian investigators, he came in early through a workers' entrance in the white smock the staff wore, waited until the Salon Carré was empty, lifted the poplar panel off its pegs and carried it to a service staircase. There he stripped away the frame and the glass case and left them on the steps. He found a door at the bottom locked, and a plumber who took him for a colleague opened it. Within minutes he was out on the street with the picture wrapped in his smock.

The French reaction veered between panic and farce. The Louvre closed for a week. The museum's director, Théophile Homolle, lost his post. Police searched trains and ships, newspapers offered rewards and printed hundreds of tips, and crowds queued to stare at the empty wall. The investigation also caught two innocent men. A former secretary of the poet Guillaume Apollinaire had stolen small Iberian statuettes from the Louvre years earlier, and some of them had passed through the hands of Apollinaire and Pablo Picasso. Apollinaire spent about a week in the Santé prison in September 1911 and Picasso was questioned. Neither had anything to do with the Mona Lisa.

The police did question Peruggia. His name was on the list of contract workers, he had a criminal record, and his prints were on file. Officers visited his room on the rue de l'Hôpital-Saint-Louis and accepted his account of himself. A print had been left on the discarded glass, but no one thought to compare it with his record. According to the usual telling, the painting sat in a trunk or under a false bottom a few feet from the detectives while they talked to him.

He kept it for more than two years. In late 1913 he answered a newspaper advertisement placed by Alfredo Geri, a Florentine antiques dealer collecting works for an exhibition, and offered him the Mona Lisa under the name 'Leonardo'. Geri brought in Giovanni Poggi, director of the Uffizi. On 11 December 1913 the two men met Peruggia at his small Florence hotel and examined the panel, checking the Louvre's stamps on its back. They took it away for safe keeping, and the next day Peruggia was arrested in his room.

Peruggia said he had acted to return to Italy a picture he believed Napoleon had looted. That was wrong: Leonardo took the portrait to France himself, and it passed into the French royal collection in the sixteenth century. His letters home spoke hopefully of a fortune to come, and he asked for a reward from Geri. The painting was put on show at the Uffizi, then handed to the French ambassador in Rome on 19 December 1913, and was back in the Louvre on 4 January 1914.

A Florentine court tried him in June 1914. It accepted that patriotism had played a part, found him guilty with mitigating circumstances, and sentenced him to a year and fifteen days. On appeal the term was reduced to seven months and eight days, which he had already largely served. He came out a minor celebrity in Italy, and the picture he took came back far more famous than it had left.