The Man Who Stole a Smile
Paris, 21 August 1911. A Monday. The Louvre is closed to the public, but staff are inside doing the usual Monday routine. A handyman named Vincenzo Peruggia — a man who had installed protective glass cases in the museum months earlier — walks into the Salon Carré, lifts the Mona Lisa off its four iron pegs, tucks it under his work smock, and walks out a side door.
It took a full day before anyone noticed. For the next two years, while sixty investigators searched across Europe and newspapers ran blank columns where the painting's image had been, the most famous painting in the world sat in a trunk with a false bottom, wrapped in red velvet, under a bed in a one-room Paris apartment. Ten minutes from the Louvre.
Maren and Ellis cover the theft, the filing error that kept it hidden for two years, and why Pablo Picasso once spent a day being questioned for stealing the Mona Lisa.
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