On this day in history, on a quiet, humid Monday morning in Paris, three men were hurrying out of the Louvre with what would become the most famous painting in the world. They were committing the “art heist of the century.”
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They were Vincenzo Perugia and the brothers, Vincenzo and Michele Lancelotti, young Italian workmen. They had come to the Louvre on Sunday afternoon and hidden themselves overnight in a narrow storeroom near the Salon Carre, a gallery stuffed with Renaissance paintings. Wearing white workmen’s smocks in the morning, they entered the Salon Carre. They grabbed a small painting off the wall. Quickly, they ripped off its glass shadow box and frame, and Perugia slipped it under his coat. They escaped from the gallery, went down a back stairwell and out through a side entrance, and into the streets of Paris.
They had stolen the Mona Lisa.
It would be 26 hours before anyone noticed that the painting was gone. It was unsurprising. At the time, the Louvre was the most enormous building in the world, with over 1,000 rooms spread over 45 acres. Security was weak; fewer than 150 guards protected a quarter of a million objects.
At the time of the “Mona Lisa” robbery, Leonardo da Vinci’s masterpiece was not the most viewed painting in the museum. Leonardo created the portrait around 1507, and in the 1860s, art critics declared that the Mona Lisa was one of the best examples of Renaissance painting. This judgment, however, had yet to filter beyond the intelligentsia, and interest in it was relatively minimal.
Which isn’t to say it was esoteric. A letter sent to the Louvre in 1910 from Vienna threatened the Mona Lisa‘s theft, so museum officials hired the glazier firm Cobier to place a dozen of its more valuable paintings under glass. The work would take three months; one of the Cobier men working on the project was Vincenzo Perugia. Perugia, the son of a bricklayer, grew up in Dumenza, a Lombardy village north of Milan. In 1907, at 25, Vincenzo left home to try out Paris, Milan, and then Lyon. After a year of moving around, he began living in Paris with his two brothers in the Italian enclave in the 10th Arrondissement.
At the time of its theft in 1911, the Mona Lisa was not the most visited item in the museum.
Perugia was short, just 5 feet 3, with a short temper, and was always willing to challenge any insult to himself or his nation. His brothers called him a passoide o megloi, a nut, or a madman. Perugia testified that his fellow French construction workers “almost always called me ‘mangia maccheroni’ (macaroni eater), and very often they stole my personal property and salted my wine.”
Twice the Parisian police arrested Perugia. First, in June 1908, he spent a night in jail for trying to rob a prostitute. Eight months later, he spent a week in the Macon, the infamous Parisian prison, and was fined 16-franc for possessing a gun during a fistfight. He even fought with his future co-conspirators; he once stopped speaking to Vincenzo Lancelotti over a disputed 1-franc loan.
Perugia had always wanted to be more than a laborer. While in court in 1914 for the theft of the Mona Lisa, the prosecution called him a house painter. Perugia stood up and, with chest stuck out, declared himself a pittore, an artist.
Stealing the Mona Lisa made sense. Most purloined paintings that were not immediately held for ransom did not go to a wealthy aristocrat’s secret hideaway but instead slid into an illicit pipeline being used as barter or collateral for drugs, arms, and other stolen goods. Perugia had enough connections to criminal circles that he hoped to barter or sell it.
Unfortunately for Perugia, the Mona Lisa got too hot to hock. Initially, the afternoon newspapers in Paris had nothing on Monday, and the following morning’s papers were also curiously quiet on the matter. Would the Louvre cover it up, pretend that it had not happened?
Finally, a media explosion occurred late on Tuesday when the Louver announced the theft. Newspapers around the world proclaimed the news. Wanted posters for the painting appeared on Parisian walls. Crowds massed at police headquarters. Thousands of spectators, including Franz Kafka, flooded the Salon Carre when the Louvre reopened a week later to stare at the empty wall with its four lonely iron hooks. Kafka and his traveling companion Max Brod marveled at the “mark of shame” at the Louvre and attended a vaudeville show lampooning the theft.
Satirical postcards, a short film, and cabaret songs followed – popular culture seized upon the theft and turned high art into mass art. Perugia realized he had not stolen an old Italian painting from a decaying royal palace. He had unluckily stolen what had become, in just a few short days, the world’s most famous painting.
Perugia hid the Mona Lisa in the false bottom of a trunk in his room at his boarding house. When the Parisian police interrogated him in November 1911 as part of their interviews of all Louvre employees, he blithely said he only learned about the theft of the painting from the newspapers and that the reason he was late to work that Monday in August – as his employer had told police – was that he had been drunk the night before and overslept.
The police believed his story. Incredibly inept, they ignored Perugia and detained the artist Pablo Picasso and the poet Guillaume Apollinaire. (They were friends with a thief who confessed to stealing little sculptures from the Louvre.) The two were promptly released.
In December 1913, after 28 months, Perugia left his Parisian boarding house with his trunk and took a train to Florence, where he tried to offload the painting to an art dealer who immediately called the police. Perugia was arrested. After a short trial in Florence, he was found guilty and sentenced to a year in jail. He served seven months in prison. He eventually served for Italy in the First World War, and he died in 1925.
The Mona Lisa became a global icon thanks to the high-profile heist. Under a shower of even more publicity, it returned to the Louvre following massively attended exhibitions in Rome, Florence, and Milan. In the first two days after it was restored to the Salon Carre, more than 120,000 people viewed it. Today, eight million people see the Mona Lisa every year.
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