How a Louvre Handyman Walked Out With the Mona Lisa and Made Her the Most Famous Painting on Earth
The Louvre is closed to the public on Mondays. On Monday, August 21, 1911, the only people inside were staff: cleaners, glaziers, the workmen who maintained the building. Among them that morning was an Italian named Vincenzo Peruggia, twenty-nine years old, who had done odd jobs there. He had helped fit the protective glass boxes onto the museum’s most valuable paintings — including, by some accounts, the one over the Mona Lisa.
The popular telling has him hidden overnight in a small storeroom; by his own later account he simply walked in that morning with the other workers. Either way, he emerged into an empty gallery in one of the white smocks the staff wore. He lifted Leonardo da Vinci’s portrait of Lisa Gherardini off its four iron pegs and carried it to a service stairway. The Mona Lisa is painted on a poplar panel about two and a half feet tall — small enough to carry out under a workman’s smock, or wrapped inside one. In the stairwell he stripped off the glass case and the heavy frame — the very fittings he may have installed — and left them propped behind student canvases on the landing.
Then the plan snagged. The door at the bottom was locked, and his key didn’t turn it. He took out a screwdriver and began unscrewing the doorknob. A Louvre plumber came down the stairs, saw a workman fumbling with a stuck door, assumed a colleague was trapped, and helped him open it. Peruggia thanked him and walked out into the courtyard with the most famous painting in France — though it was not yet that — tucked against him.
For the better part of a day, no one noticed.
Two clocks
From that morning, the story runs on two clocks that almost never touch. One is loud and public and frantic: the museum, the police, the press, a nation looking for a painting. The other is quiet and almost still: the painting itself, which spent the next two years a few feet from where a house painter slept, while the first clock ran itself ragged.
The loud one started a day late. On the morning of Tuesday, August 22, the painter Louis Béroud set up his easel in the Salon Carré to copy the Mona Lisa, as he had done before. The four iron pegs that held her to the wall were there. The painting was not. A guard, when Béroud flagged him, was unbothered — the museum routinely pulled pictures upstairs to be photographed — and went to check. By early afternoon the studio confirmed it had nothing, and the truth set in. The portrait that had hung on that wall for decades was gone.
What followed was a national humiliation. The Louvre closed for a week. France shut its borders, searched outgoing trains and ships, and dragged the Seine. The head of the Paris police took personal charge. The press ran the empty wall on front pages across Europe, and a portrait most people outside the art world could not have named became, overnight, a face everyone was looking for. When the museum reopened, people lined up not to see a masterpiece but to stare at the four empty pegs and the faint outline on the wall where she had hung.
The quiet clock, meanwhile, kept almost perfect time at nothing. The painting was in Peruggia’s room across the city, hidden in the false bottom of a wooden trunk a few feet from where he slept. The empty space on the gallery wall had read, to anyone who glanced at it on Monday, like a picture out for cleaning; it was Béroud’s easel the next morning that turned a routine absence into a crime. By the time the loud clock started, the painting had a full day’s head start, and then it simply sat.
The wrong men
The louder the public clock ran, the further it strayed from the panel in the trunk. The investigation flailed, and then it briefly swept up the avant-garde. The poet Guillaume Apollinaire, who had once joked that the Louvre should be burned down, was jailed for five days in September on suspicion of involvement in art thefts. He implicated his friend Pablo Picasso, who had bought stolen Iberian statuettes spirited out of the same museum. Picasso was questioned, denied everything, and was let go. Both were innocent of the Mona Lisa.
Detectives did work through the roster of men who had the run of the building — the men in white smocks who could lift a panel off the wall on a closed Monday and carry it down a service stair — and they even called on Peruggia and questioned him. He told them what they wanted to hear, and they crossed him off. While the police chased poets, the man who had done exactly that was at home with the painting.
Peruggia later said he had fallen for her, that he kept her out and looked at her in the evenings. Whatever the truth of that, the two clocks held their distance: a continent’s worth of detectives running in one direction, the painting motionless in the other, the gap between them widening for two full years.
The dealer in Florence
The clocks finally met because Peruggia decided to make them. By late 1913 he wanted to be done with it, and he had convinced himself that getting rid of it could be an act of patriotism rather than a confession. His story, which he never abandoned, was that the Mona Lisa had been looted from Italy by Napoleon and that he was bringing her home. It was wrong: Leonardo carried the painting to France himself, and it passed to the French king Francis I in the sixteenth century, two and a half centuries before Napoleon was born. But it gave Peruggia a frame that fit, and it pointed him toward Italy.
In November 1913 an antiques dealer in Florence, Alfredo Geri, received a letter signed “Leonardo.” The writer claimed to have the stolen Mona Lisa and wanted to return it to Italy — for half a million lire. Geri, suspecting either a hoax or a crime, brought in Giovanni Poggi, the director of the Uffizi, and arranged to meet the man.
Peruggia checked into a cheap hotel near the Florence train station, the Albergo Tripoli-Italia, room 20. When Geri and Poggi arrived, he heaved a battered trunk onto the bed, lifted out a false bottom packed with underwear and tools, and unwrapped a wooden panel. Poggi knew it within seconds: the crackle of the varnish, the dimensions, the Louvre’s own inventory marks stamped on the back. It was real. The two men said the painting would need to be examined and authenticated, took it with them on that pretext, and went straight to the police. Peruggia was arrested in his hotel room in December 1913. After two years of running, the loud clock had needed only the thief to walk into a dealer’s shop.
What the theft made
The two stories converge on a single, ironic outcome. Before its return, the Mona Lisa was hung in the Uffizi and shown to the Italian public, who came in crowds to see the picture that had embarrassed France and come home for a fortnight. It traveled under guard back across the border and was rehung in the Louvre in January 1914. Tens of thousands of people filed past it in the first days — most of them, almost certainly, seeing it for the first time because it had once been gone.
Peruggia stood trial in Italy, where a strain of public sympathy ran in his favor; a man who insisted he had only wanted to repatriate a national treasure made an awkward villain. He was sentenced to a little over a year, reduced on appeal, and served about seven months. He went back to working as a house painter, fought in the First World War, and died in obscurity.
The painting he stole did the opposite. The Mona Lisa had been admired by specialists and largely unremarked by everyone else — one fine Renaissance portrait among the Louvre’s thousands. The theft, the borders slammed shut, the empty wall photographed for the world, the two-year manhunt that ran in the wrong direction while she lay still in a trunk: that was the story that lifted her out of the gallery and into the front of every mind. She came back more famous than any painting had ever been, and she has never come down.