On the morning of August 22, 1911, a painter named Louis Béroud walked into the Louvre’s Salon Carré to sketch the Mona Lisa and found four bare iron pegs where she should have hung. Museum staff assumed the painting had simply been taken away to be photographed, as sometimes happened. It took more than 24 hours for anyone to realize that Leonardo da Vinci’s five-century-old portrait had, in fact, been stolen — walked out of the world’s most famous museum tucked under the coat of a man who had spent the previous year helping to build the very case designed to protect her.

An Inside Man in a White Smock

The thief was Vincenzo Peruggia, a 32-year-old Italian glazier who had worked at the Louvre fitting protective glass cases onto some of its most valuable paintings — including, months earlier, the very frame that housed the Mona Lisa. That prior job gave him detailed knowledge of exactly how the painting was secured to the wall and how quickly it could be removed. On the morning of the theft, a Monday when the museum was closed to the public for cleaning, Peruggia entered through an employee door wearing the same white smock worn by museum workmen, making him functionally invisible to the skeleton staff on duty. He lifted the panel — painted on wood, not canvas — off its four iron support pegs, carried it to a service stairwell, removed it from its frame and protective glass case, wrapped the bare panel in his smock, and walked out through a door he had reportedly pre-loosened, evading only the mildest of challenges along the way.

A Farcical, Sweeping Investigation

The disappearance triggered a national sensation and an investigation so aggressive it became almost comic in retrospect. More than 60 police officers searched the Louvre floor to floor. The museum closed for a full week for the first time in its history. French border guards were put on alert to search departing luggage. In the frenzy, poet and critic Guillaume Apollinaire was arrested after an associate had previously stolen small statuettes from the Louvre and implicated him, and Apollinaire in turn implicated his friend Pablo Picasso, who was brought in for questioning; both men were ultimately cleared. Peruggia himself was interviewed by police twice as a former Louvre employee and let go both times — investigators simply couldn’t imagine that the unassuming glazier who had helped build the painting’s case would be brazen enough to have stolen it.

Two Years in a Trunk With a False Bottom

While Paris searched frantically and the story dominated front pages across Europe, the Mona Lisa sat wrapped in cloth inside a wood trunk with a false bottom in Peruggia’s one-room apartment on the outskirts of the city — for more than two years. Peruggia later claimed his motive was patriotic: he wanted to return the painting to Italy, believing (mistakenly, since the work had been legally acquired by French royalty during the Renaissance rather than looted by Napoleon) that it had been stolen from his homeland. Historians have treated that explanation skeptically, noting that a genuinely patriotic thief would likely have handed the painting straight to an Italian museum rather than attempt to sell it, which is precisely what Peruggia eventually tried to do.

The Sale That Wasn’t

In December 1913, Peruggia finally made his move, writing to Florence art dealer Alfredo Geri under an alias and offering to sell “the Mona Lisa” for what he described as fair compensation for Italy’s stolen heritage. Geri, stunned but suspicious, alerted Giovanni Poggi, director of Florence’s Uffizi Gallery, and the two men met with Peruggia at his hotel room, where he produced the painting from the same trunk. After examining it and confirming its authenticity, Geri and Poggi told Peruggia they needed to verify it further and left with the painting — instead alerting police, who arrested Peruggia on December 11, 1913. The Mona Lisa was displayed briefly across Italy to jubilant crowds before being formally returned to France and rehung in the Louvre in January 1914.

A Lenient Sentence and a Legend Born

Tried in Florence in June 1914, Peruggia was convicted of aggravated theft but treated with striking leniency by an Italian court and public sympathetic to his professed patriotism; he was sentenced to just over a year in prison, reduced on appeal to seven months and eight days — time he had effectively already served while awaiting trial, meaning he walked free almost immediately. He returned to relatively ordinary life, later serving in the Italian army during World War I and eventually settling in France, where he died in 1925. The theft, meanwhile, achieved something no amount of scholarship ever had: before 1911, the Mona Lisa was admired but not singularly famous among the Louvre’s holdings; the two-year global manhunt and the sensational recovery made her the single most recognizable painting on Earth, a status she has never relinquished.

Why This Case Still Matters

The Mona Lisa theft remains one of the rare crimes in history that fundamentally altered the value and meaning of the object stolen. It exposed staggering security failures at one of the world’s premier museums, prompted the Louvre and institutions worldwide to overhaul how masterpieces were displayed and guarded, and became an early case study in how mass media coverage of a crime can permanently reshape culture. More than a century later, art historians still credit Peruggia’s theft — however clumsy, however unglamorous its execution — with manufacturing the mystique that now draws millions of visitors a year to stand behind bulletproof glass and stare at four square feet of poplar panel.

The Question the Theft Never Answered

Peruggia went to his grave insisting he acted out of love of country, not profit — even though his own attempt to sell the painting for cash undercuts that story at every turn. More than a hundred years on, with the trial transcripts long settled and the painting hanging safely behind reinforced glass in Paris, one question still nags at historians: was Vincenzo Peruggia really a patriot who stumbled into a bad business decision, or a common thief who got lucky enough, and clever enough, to write himself into legend?