The Greatest Art Heist in History: How the Mona Lisa Was Stolen from the Louvre (1911)

If you hap­pen to go to the Lou­vre to have a look at Leonar­do da Vin­ci’s Mona Lisa, you’ll find that you can’t get espe­cial­ly close to it. That owes in part to the ever-present crowd of cell­phone pho­tog­ra­phers, and more so to the paint­ing’s hav­ing been installed behind a wood­en bar­ri­er and encased in a stur­dy-look­ing glass box. These are suit­able pre­cau­tions, you might imag­ine, for the sin­gle most famous work of art in the world. But there was­n’t always so much secu­ri­ty, and indeed, nor was Mona Lisa always so dear­ly prized. A lit­tle more than a cen­tu­ry ago, you could just walk out of the Lou­vre with it.

You could do so, that is, pro­vid­ed you had a knowl­edge of the Lou­vre’s inter­nal oper­a­tions, the nerve to pluck a mas­ter­piece off its walls, and the will­ing­ness to spend a night in one of the muse­um’s clos­ets. Vin­cen­zo Perug­gia, an Ital­ian immi­grant who’d worked there as a clean­er and reframer of paint­ings, had all those qual­i­ties. On the evening of Sun­day, August 20th, 1911, Perug­gia entered the Lou­vre wear­ing one of its stan­dard-issue employ­ee coats. The next day, he emerged into an almost emp­ty muse­um, closed as it was to the pub­lic every Mon­day. You can find out what hap­pened next by watch­ing the Pri­mal Space video above, which visu­al­izes each step of the heist and its after­math.

Why did Perug­gia dare to steal the Mona Lisa in broad day­light, an act wor­thy of Arsène Lupin (him­self cre­at­ed just a few years ear­li­er)? Dis­cov­ered a cou­ple years lat­er, hav­ing hid­den the paint­ing in the false bot­tom of a trunk near­ly all the while, Perug­gia cast him­self as an Ital­ian patri­ot attempt­ing to return a piece of cul­tur­al pat­ri­mo­ny to its home­land. Anoth­er pos­si­bil­i­ty, elab­o­rat­ed upon in the video, is that he was noth­ing more than a pawn in a larg­er scheme mas­ter­mind­ed by the forg­er Eduar­do de Val­fier­no, who planned to make sev­er­al copies of the miss­ing mas­ter­piece and sell them to cred­u­lous Amer­i­can mil­lion­aires.

That, in any case, is what one Sat­ur­day Evening Post sto­ry report­ed in 1932, though it could well be that, in real­i­ty, Perug­gia act­ed alone, out of no high­er motive than a need for cash. (In a way, it would have been a more inter­est­ing sto­ry had the cul­prits actu­al­ly been Pablo Picas­so and Guil­laume Apol­li­naire, whose unre­lat­ed pos­ses­sion of stat­ues stolen from the Lou­vre drew police sus­pi­cion.) How­ev­er the heist occurred, it would­n’t have hap­pened if its object had­n’t already been wide­ly known, at least among art enthu­si­asts. But soon after La Gio­con­da was returned to her right­ful place, she became the face of art itself — and the rea­son muse­ums do things much dif­fer­ent­ly now than they did in the nine­teen-tens. The Lou­vre, you’ll notice, is now closed on Tues­days instead.

Relat­ed con­tent:

What Makes Leonardo’s Mona Lisa a Great Paint­ing?: An Expla­na­tion in 15 Min­utes

How the Mona Lisa Went From Being Bare­ly Known, to Sud­den­ly the Most Famous Paint­ing in the World (1911)

What Makes the Mona Lisa a Great Paint­ing: A Deep Dive

Why Leonar­do da Vinci’s Great­est Paint­ing is Not the Mona Lisa

How France Hid the Mona Lisa & Oth­er Lou­vre Mas­ter­pieces Dur­ing World War II

When Pablo Picas­so and Guil­laume Apol­li­naire Were Accused of Steal­ing the Mona Lisa (1911)

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.