On 22 August 1911, two artists accredited by the Louvre Museum, the painter Louis Béroud and the engraver Frédéric Laguillermie, arrived early in the morning at the museum where they were to reproduce works by the great masters. As they prepared to draw inspiration from the work of Leonardo da Vinci, they came face to face with an empty wall: the Mona Lisa had disappeared.
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Alerted by the two artists, the guards went in search of the painting and hoped to find it in the studio of Braun & Cie, the official photographer of the Louvre. But after a fruitless search, they realised the obvious: the Mona Lisa had indeed been stolen.
The frame dating from the Italian Renaissance and the glass of the painting were quickly found in the small staircase of the Louvre leading to the Visconti courtyard. Fingerprints were found there and compared to those of the 257 museum employees, without results. Faced with pressure, the director of the Louvre at the time, Théophile Homolle, was forced to resign.
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The judge in charge of investigating the case, Joseph-Marie Drioux, went so far as to suspect Kaiser Wilhelm II (the third and last German emperor) of being responsible for the disappearance. The incompetency of the police drew ridicule and criticism by the press and public.
The writer Guillaume Apollinaire was imprisoned from 8 to 12 September for complicity in harbouring a criminal because of his affiliation with Géry Pieret, his former secretary. Pieret, who had stolen statuettes and Phoenician masks from the Louvre in 1907, contacted the daily Paris-Journal on 28 August 1911 and falsely claimed to have stolen the Mona Lisa, before demanding a ransom of 150,000 francs. Pablo Picasso, who had bought some of the statuettes and masks from Pieret, was also questioned at length.
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The Society of Friends of the Louvre offered a reward of 25,000 francs to anyone who found the painting, while the magazine L'Illustration promised 40,000 francs to the person who returned it to the museum. The Mona Lisa gained worldwide fame, but there was still no trace of the painting.
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It turned out that the Mona Lisa was in Paris, a few streets from the Louvre. Where? With an Italian glazier by the name of Vincenzo Peruggia, well-known to the museum since he framed the Mona Lisa a few months earlier. Familiar with the place, Peruggia entered the Louvre on 21 August 1911, the day the museum was closed, to discreetly steal the painting. He kept the Mona Lisa for two years, hidden in the double bottom of a wooden suitcase under his bed.
Two years later, he decided to resell the painting in Italy, but his theft did not take long to be discovered. Florentine antique dealer Alfredo Geri, who had published an ad to buy works of art, was contacted by Peruggia on 10 December 1913, but he quickly sensed the scam. Accompanied by Giovanni Poggi, director of the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, he confirmed the authenticity of the work and warned the police who arrested Peruggia. The Italian glazier was sentenced to 18 months in prison.
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After a tour of Italy, the Mona Lisa was finally returned to the Louvre on 4 January 1914, where it has since been subject to increased surveillance.
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Even today, Vincenzo Peruggia's motivations remain unclear, and many theories have been thrown around. During his trial, his lawyers claimed a patriotic act, claiming that Peruggia wanted to return the Mona Lisa to his home country in revenge for the thefts perpetrated by Napoleon Bonaparte during his military campaigns. Others claim that Peruggia would have acted on behalf of the Argentinian forger Eduardo Valfierno, known for wanting to scam American buyers by selling them six copies of the Mona Lisa made in 1910 by Yves Chaudron. Another more romantic version also exists: Peruggia thought the Mona Lisa resembled a woman he loved in his youth, who died in an avalanche, and stole the painting in memory of this young woman, a story chronicled in the 1931 film The Theft of the Mona Lisa.
Today, Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa is still on display in the Louvre and remains the most visited work of art in the world.
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This is an updated version of an article originally published on 12 December 2016.