The theft that made the Mona Lisa world-famous
Today the Mona Lisa is often called the most famous painting in the world, and it is easy to assume it was always so. For most of its history it wasn't.
The portrait had belonged to King Francis I of France and was among the first works shown in the Louvre after the French Revolution turned it into a national museum. Its reputation grew in the mid-19th century, when French writers and critics praised it as mysterious, and an 1878 Baedeker guide called it the most celebrated work of Leonardo in the Louvre. But it was known mainly to the educated. To the general public it was one admired painting among many.
On Monday 21 August 1911, a day the Louvre was closed, the painting was taken from the wall of the Salon Carré. No one noticed until the next day, when the painter Louis Béroud came in and found it missing.
The museum closed for a week. The poet Guillaume Apollinaire was arrested, and his friend Pablo Picasso was questioned; both were cleared. Newspapers offered rewards, and over the next two years hundreds of false leads reached the police and the press. People came to the Louvre simply to look at the empty space where the painting had hung.
Found in Florence
The thief was Vincenzo Peruggia, an Italian who had worked at the Louvre and helped build the painting's protective glass case. He kept it hidden in his Paris lodgings for two years, then took it to Florence and contacted an art dealer, Alfredo Geri. Geri called in Giovanni Poggi, the director of the Uffizi, who confirmed it was genuine, and Peruggia was arrested on 12 December 1913.
Peruggia said he wanted the painting to be in Italy, and many Italians hailed him as a patriot, though letters to his father suggest he also hoped to profit. He received a lenient sentence. The painting was shown in Italy to large crowds before it went back to the Louvre.
By then the story had been reported around the world, and the face went with it. Through the 20th century the Mona Lisa was reproduced, parodied and used in advertising again and again.
None of this means it lacked merit before 1911. But the leap from admired masterpiece to the face everyone knows owes a great deal to an empty wall.
Who was arrested in Florence in December 1913 for stealing the Mona Lisa?
The Mona Lisa was admired before 1911, but its theft and the worldwide headlines that followed made it a painting almost everyone knows.
