The Thief Who Made the Mona Lisa Famous

On the morning of 22 August 1911 a painter named Louis Béroud arrived at the Louvre to sketch the Mona Lisa and found four iron pegs on an empty wall. A guard assumed the museum photographers had moved it. They had not. The painting had been taken the day before, and it would be missing for more than two years.

The theft was the work of Vincenzo Peruggia, an Italian who had earlier worked at the museum fitting protective glass over paintings. He is reported to have hidden in a closet overnight, lifted the panel from its frame and left with it under a smock. The Louvre closed for a week. Newspapers across Europe and North America carried the story on their front pages, and crowds filed past the empty space where the painting had been.

Before the theft the portrait was admired by connoisseurs but was not the most famous picture in the world. The scandal changed that. Reproductions multiplied, and the poet Guillaume Apollinaire, who was briefly held on suspicion, and Pablo Picasso were both questioned by the police. A painting that few ordinary people had thought about became a subject of daily conversation because it was absent.

A painting that few ordinary people had thought about became a subject of daily conversation because it was absent.

Peruggia kept the picture in a trunk in his Paris room until December 1913, when he offered it to an art dealer in Florence. The dealer alerted the authorities, and the painting was shown in Italian cities before it returned to the Louvre in 1914. Peruggia said he wished to bring the work home to Italy, though the portrait had entered the French royal collection in the sixteenth century. He served a short prison sentence and was treated by many Italians as a patriot.

The episode raises an uncomfortable question for anyone who believes that greatness is visible in the work itself. If a crime can turn an admired portrait into a global icon, then fame may owe as much to absence, rumour and attention as to quality. The painting that now draws millions behind protective glass may be loved partly for what it is and partly for what happened when it was gone, and nobody can say with confidence where one reason ends and the other begins.