For two years, Mona Lisa lived in a trunk inside a Parisian boarding house. Police papered the city with 6,500 leaflets featuring the painting, offering a 40,000 franc reward for its return. Inspector Alphonse Bertillon employed the still-novel method of fingerprinting, gathering 257 sets from the employees who were on call that Monday. All to no avail.
The wall remained empty for a time, a reminder of what had been lost. Museum goers like Franz Kafka and Max Brod visited the museum to pay tribute to the blank space.
"Poor Mona Lisa," The New York Times wrote, "after many years of silent triumph in Louvre, in which she has received the tributes of the whole world, has lately been subjected to perplexing misadventures.” The article reported a rumor from a year prior, in which an American millionaire had purchased the painting, leaving a copy in its place. There was no truth to the report, but the museum soon found itself employing similar recourse.
The Louvre added a color reproduction in the painting’s place until it began to curl and fade, an inadvertent symbol of diminishing hope that it might soon return. The copy was replaced by Portrait of Baldassare Castiglione. Painted the decade after da Vinci’s masterpiece, the work wasn’t derivative, but was undoubtedly an homage to a fellow Renaissance great.
Raphael had admired the Mona Lisa when it hung in Rome. His portrait took compositional cues from the earlier painting, with a familiar lighting and mood. Its subject doesn’t smile, exactly, nor, however, does he adopt the stern face of many contemporaries. But unlike da Vinci’s piece, the provenance is clear. Castiglione, a diplomat, was close friend with the painter, who rose the ranks of Italian society in similar fashion. The work would hang in its subject’s home before being acquired by an Italian cardinal. In 1661, Louis XIV purchased the painting, making France its permanent home.
Portrait of Baldassare Castiglione’s reputation had grown over the centuries, ultimately regarded as one of the Italian Renaissance’s great portraits. But it wasn’t the Mona Lisa.
What many now consider the greatest art heist of the 20th century may well have also been one of the simplest. Vincenzo Peruggia, a Louvre employee familiar with the building’s layout, walked into the museum at 7AM on a Monday and exited with the Mona Lisa soon after. According to the account given to years later, Peruggia entered the museum undetected, donning the staff uniform of a white smock. Beelining to the Salon Carré, he lifted the painting from the quartet of iron pegs securing it to the wall and adjourned to a stairwell.
The painting was too large to conceal on his slight frame, so Peruggia pulled off his smock and draped it over the Mona Lisa before exiting the building a newly minted world class art thief. The museum was closed on Mondays, and it would be a full 26 hours before anyone realized the painting was missing. The heist was even simpler than the tale the police had cooked up, which hypothesized that the culprit had entered a supply closet the day prior and walked out of the building after an overnight stay.
An additional – but not entirely substantiated report – emerged decades later, suggesting that Peruggia had been part of a broader criminal conspiracy masterminded by confidence man, Eduardo de Valfierno, who enlisted an art forger to paint multiple copies of the piece. Once word emerged that the Mona Lisa had gone missing, they would be sold to art collectors in far reaching locales.
In 1912, The New York Times reported an incorrect rumor that the painting was now hanging on the wall of a private art collector in St. Petersburg, Russia. In truth, it hadn’t yet left Paris.
Peruggia was among the hundreds of Louvre employees interrogated. The Mona Lisa was stashed away in his home when the police visited. He told them he was working at another museum the day it had gone missing, and he was never named a suspect. The department didn’t bother fingerprinting him. It was a lucky break, as Peruggia had left a thumbprint on the Mona Lisa’s protective glass case during the theft – a case he’d built.
After two years spent in an apartment trunk, the painting was transferred to the false bottom of a suitcase, wrapped in red cloth and topped with undergarments. Peruggia boarded a train to Florence. After nearly 400 years, the Mona Lisa was finally coming home. This, Peruggia would later tell police, had been the plan the whole time. He was convinced that the painting was among the works of art stolen by Napoleon and was determined to see it hanging in Italy again.
Peruggia would get his wish, though the chain of events called into question his self-proclaimed patriotic motive. So, too, did a letter he’d written shortly after the theft, telling his father, “I will make my fortune, and it will arrive in one shot.” Now storing the painting in his Florence apartment he contacted Mario Fratelli, informing him that he had the Mona Lisa and was expecting a sizable reward for its return. Taking the painting for “safe keeping,” the art dealer authenticated the work and contacted the police, who arrested Peruggia.
The trial became a sideshow, courtesy of a defendant who argued passionately with the judge and lawyers on both sides. He claimed that he had fallen in love with the painting and only sought to liberate it. A psychiatrist for the defense called the man “intellectually deficient,” and a sympathetic court sentenced him to the seven months he’d already served.
Prior to its return to Paris, the painting went on display to packed houses in Rome and Milan. The Italian public embraced Peruggia, as well, showering him with gifts for temporarily bringing Mona Lisa home.
Sources:
The Crimes of Paris by Dorothy and Thomas Hoobler
The Theft That Made The 'Mona Lisa' A Masterpiece https://www.npr.org/2011/07/30/138800110/the-theft-that-made-the-mona-lisa-a-masterpiece
How the 1911 theft of the Mona Lisa made it the world’s most famous painting https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2019/10/20/how-theft-mona-lisa-made-it-worlds-most-famous-painting/
Perrugia and his trial https://www.pbs.org/treasuresoftheworld/mona_lisa/mlevel_2/mlevel2_trial.html
Mona Lisa in Russia? https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1912/09/26/100549937.html?pageNumber=11