Man Stole Mona Lisa Painting
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On a quiet Monday morning in Paris, a short, ordinary workman walked out of the world’s most famous museum carrying the world’s most famous smile under his arm. There were no alarms, no chase and no broken windows. He simply opened a door and left. What follows is the dated timeline of that morning, and of the strange two years that came after it.
Paris, 1908
Vincenzo Peruggia was born on 8 October 1881 in Dumenza, a small village in the Italian Alps near the Swiss border. In 1908 he moved to Paris, like many young Italians looking for work, and found jobs as a decorator and glazier — a man who works with glass.
For a short time he worked inside the Louvre. His job was to clean and reframe paintings, and to build the strong protective glass cases that guarded the museum’s treasures. One of the cases he helped to build was the case of the Mona Lisa, Leonardo da Vinci’s portrait of a woman with a small, mysterious smile. Peruggia knew exactly how that case was fixed to the wall, and how it could be opened in minutes. Nobody at the museum thought this knowledge was dangerous. He was just a quiet workman in a white smock.
Monday, 21 August 1911
Monday was the Louvre’s closing day, and in the summer holidays the great building was nearly empty. Peruggia later told the police in Florence that he walked in at about seven in the morning through the door the other workers used, wearing one of the white smocks that Louvre employees wore, so that nobody could tell him apart from the staff. Some later accounts say he had hidden inside the museum overnight in a small closet. Whichever version is true, the result was the same: when the Salon Carré, the room where the Mona Lisa hung, was empty, he was alone with the painting.
He lifted it off the four iron pegs that held it to the wall, between a painting by Correggio and one by Titian, and carried it to a nearby service stairway. There he removed the protective case and the frame — the very type of case he had once helped to build — and hid the pieces behind some student artworks stored on the landing. What remained was the bare wooden panel, about 53 by 77 centimetres. Most reports say he hid the panel under his large work smock, although some writers doubt a man only 160 centimetres tall could hide it that way. What is certain is the ending: he went down to a service door, a plumber who took him for an employee kindly unlocked it, and Vincenzo Peruggia walked out of the Louvre with the Mona Lisa.
Tuesday, 22 August 1911
The strangest part of the theft is that nobody noticed. Paintings were often taken down to be photographed, so an empty space on the wall worried no one at first. It was only the next day, when the painter Louis Béroud arrived to make a copy of the Mona Lisa and found four bare pegs, that the truth came out — roughly a full day after the theft. The museum’s director was away on holiday. At least sixty policemen were sent to search the building, and the officer in charge calmly promised that the case would take only two or three days. He was wrong by more than two years.
One Week Later
The Louvre stayed closed for a whole week while police searched it room by room. When the doors finally opened again, thousands of people queued up — not to see a painting, but to stare at the empty wall and its four lonely iron hooks. The writer Franz Kafka was among the visitors who came to look at the gap. Newspapers all over the world put the theft on their front pages, offered rewards for information, and printed hundreds of false leads. Police even searched the passengers of an ocean liner about to sail, and searched another ship in New York.
The hunt also touched two men who would become giants of modern art. The poet Guillaume Apollinaire was arrested, and he named his friend, the young Spanish painter Pablo Picasso, who was also brought in and questioned. Both men were released, and both were completely innocent — but the arrests show how desperate, and how lost, the police had become.
Autumn 1911
In September 1911, detectives began visiting the homes of the outside workers who had done jobs at the Louvre. They came to Peruggia’s small Paris apartment and questioned him. They came a second time. The painting was in that room the whole time, hidden inside a wooden trunk — by some accounts, in a false bottom built into it. One detective, finishing his report, is said to have leaned on the very table under which the panel lay hidden. The officers believed Peruggia’s calm answers and left.
In my view, this is the most astonishing part of the whole affair: the police were not beaten by a criminal genius, they were beaten by their own assumptions. They even held a clue in their hands. Peruggia had left a thumbprint on the glass of the case, and his fingerprints were already in police files from an earlier arrest — yet nobody compared them. The quiet workman was simply too ordinary to suspect.
November–December 1913
For over two years, the Mona Lisa lay in a trunk in Paris while the world wondered where she was. Peruggia grew impatient. In November 1913 he wrote, under the name “Leonardo”, to Alfredo Geri, an art dealer in Florence, Italy, offering to bring the painting to Italy in return for a reward. He travelled home by train with the panel in his trunk and kept it for a short time in Florence.
Geri suspected the truth at once. He called in Giovanni Poggi, the director of the Uffizi Gallery, who examined the painting and confirmed it was Leonardo’s original. The two men took the painting into safekeeping, informed the police, and on 12 December 1913 Peruggia was arrested at his hotel. The most wanted picture on Earth had been found, not by brilliant detective work, but because the thief tried to sell it.
4 January 1914
Before going home, the Mona Lisa toured Italy. She was shown in Florence, Milan and Rome to enormous, emotional crowds; one American newspaper reported that 30,000 people in Florence swept the police aside in a rush to see her. Then, on 4 January 1914, she was carried back into the Louvre. More than 100,000 people came to see her in her first two days back on the wall — crowds the painting had never drawn before it was stolen.
Summer 1914
Peruggia was put on trial in Florence. He said he had acted out of love for Italy: he believed Napoleon had stolen the painting from his homeland, and he wanted to bring it back. The belief was sincere but mistaken — Leonardo himself had carried the painting to France three centuries earlier, and King Francis I had bought it fairly. Many in Italy still treated Peruggia as a patriot. The court gave him a gentle sentence of one year and fifteen days, and after an appeal he served only about seven months. For the most publicised art theft in history, it was a remarkably light punishment.
Why Did He Steal the Mona Lisa?
His true motive is still argued about today. The patriotic story has a problem: a pure patriot would have handed the painting to an Italian museum, not tried to sell it to a dealer. Letters Peruggia wrote to his father after the theft speak of making his fortune in Paris, which suggests money was on his mind too. He had also once travelled to London hoping to sell the painting, and was laughed at by a dealer there. Perhaps the honest answer is that both motives lived in the same man — pride and profit, mixed together. After his release he served in the Italian army during the First World War, married, had a daughter, and returned to France to work quietly as a painter and decorator. He died on 8 October 1925, his forty-fourth birthday, almost forgotten by the newspapers that had once printed his name across the world.
Did the Theft Make the Mona Lisa Famous?
Honestly, yes — a very large part of her fame begins here. Before 1911 the Mona Lisa was admired by artists and scholars, but she was not yet the global icon she is today; she was not widely known outside the art world. The theft changed that in days. A two-year disappearance, banner headlines, wanted posters, satirical postcards and songs turned a Renaissance portrait into a household name on every continent. Guinness World Records describes the painting as the most valuable object ever stolen, and notes that its long disappearance placed it at the centre of world attention. The crowds who queued to see an empty wall in 1911 were, in a way, the first of the millions who queue to see her today.
Frequently Asked Questions
Who stole the Mona Lisa?
The thief was Vincenzo Peruggia, an Italian glazier and decorator who had briefly worked at the Louvre and had helped build the painting’s protective glass case.
How did Peruggia steal the Mona Lisa?
On the museum’s closing day, Monday 21 August 1911, he entered dressed in a worker’s white smock, lifted the painting off its four iron pegs, removed the frame and case on a service stairway, and walked out through a service door with the panel hidden under his smock.
How long was the Mona Lisa missing?
Just over two years — from August 1911 until December 1913, when Peruggia tried to sell it in Florence and was arrested.
Was Picasso really accused of stealing the Mona Lisa?
Yes. Picasso and the poet Guillaume Apollinaire were arrested and questioned during the investigation, then released. Neither man had anything to do with the theft.
How long did Peruggia spend in prison?
He was sentenced to one year and fifteen days, and served only about seven months after an appeal — a light sentence, helped by the court’s view that he had acted from patriotic motives.
