The Man Who Stole a Smile

On the morning of Monday, 21 August 1911, the Louvre was closed to the public and busy with staff. Cleaners moved through the galleries. Maintenance workers did what maintenance workers do on Monday mornings. Somewhere inside the building was a thirty-year-old Italian handyman named Vincenzo Peruggia, who had worked at the museum months earlier installing protective glass cases around a number of paintings. He knew the layout. He knew the routines. He had spent the previous night locked inside a supply closet, waiting.

When the galleries emptied of visitors, Peruggia walked into the Salon Carré, lifted the Mona Lisa off its four iron pegs, tucked it under his work smock, and walked out a side door. No alarm sounded. No guard stopped him. He walked through the museum, down a staircase, and out onto a Paris street with the most famous painting in Europe under his jacket.

The day nobody noticed

It took until Tuesday afternoon before anyone at the Louvre confirmed that the painting was missing. A visitor had asked a guard where the Mona Lisa was; the guard assumed it had been taken for photographing, which was routine. Hours passed before someone went to check. By then the painting had been out of the building for more than twenty-four hours.

The Louvre closed for a week. Sixty investigators were assigned to the case. The newspapers, deprived of the image they had intended to print, ran blank columns in its place. The theft became, almost overnight, international news — and the Mona Lisa, until then merely one of many Renaissance treasures in the Louvre's collection, became the painting it has been ever since: the most famous in the world.

The Picasso interlude

The French police investigation was expansive and, in places, strange. The poet Guillaume Apollinaire was arrested in connection with an earlier Louvre theft and held for a week, during which, under questioning, he named Pablo Picasso as a possible associate. Picasso was summoned, questioned, and released. Both men were eventually cleared. Neither had anything to do with the Mona Lisa.

Peruggia, meanwhile, had the painting in his apartment at 5 rue de l'Hôpital Saint-Louis. He had placed it in a trunk with a false bottom, wrapped in red velvet, and stowed it under his bed. Ten minutes' walk from the museum that was searching for it.

The filing error

The Parisian police had Peruggia's fingerprints. He had left them on the glass case he had helped install. They had the match. But the national fingerprint system of the time, recently established and still being catalogued, filed prints on the basis of the right hand. Peruggia's were on file from an earlier minor offence — but on the left. The two sets, belonging to the same man, were never cross-referenced. The evidence was in the file. The file was unreachable.

For two years, while the Mona Lisa lay in a Parisian bedroom, the police searched further afield: Germany, the United States, the private collections of wealthy eccentrics. The painting was not in any of those places. It was under a bed.

The ending in Florence

In November 1913, Peruggia wrote to an art dealer in Florence named Alfredo Geri. He offered to return the painting to Italy — where, he believed, it belonged — for five hundred thousand lire. Geri, suspicious, invited him to come anyway. Peruggia arrived at a Florence hotel, unwrapped the red velvet in a guest room, and presented the painting to Geri and to Giovanni Poggi, the director of the Uffizi. They confirmed it was authentic. They told Peruggia it was beautiful. They contacted the police, who arrested him while he was eating his dinner.

He was tried in Florence rather than Paris, under Italian jurisdiction. He argued that he had acted from patriotic conviction — that Leonardo's painting had been stolen by Napoleon and ought to come home. (It had not; Leonardo brought the painting to France himself, as a gift to King Francis I, in 1516.) His motive was entirely based on a misunderstanding of art history. The Italian public, uninterested in the correction, treated him as a folk hero. His sentence was one year and fifteen days. It was reduced on appeal to seven months. He had already served seven months by the time the appeal concluded.

Afterwards

The Mona Lisa toured Italian museums briefly, was returned to the Louvre in January 1914, and has not left it since. Peruggia served in the Italian army in the First World War, returned to France, married, had a daughter, ran a hardware store, and died in 1925. A quiet life, for the man who conducted the most famous art theft in modern history.

The painting now hangs behind bulletproof glass, viewed by roughly ten million people a year. Most of them have no idea that it once lived in a trunk with a false bottom, under a handyman's bed, in an apartment ten minutes from the room in which they are now standing.

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Listen to the full story on The Vault, Episode 2. Stream the episode here.