The Mona Lisa is stolen from the Louvre | History Today The Mona Lisa is stolen from the Louvre France Art The theft of the most famous painting in the world on August 21st, 1911, created a media sensation. Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa, also known as La Gioconda, is the most famous painting in the world. Quantities of effort and ink have been spent over the years on identifying who she was and deciding what her enigmatic smile signifies, what she says about femininity, if anything, and why she has no eyebrows. Leonardo took the painting with him when he was invited to France by Francis I in 1516. The king bought it and at the French Revolution it was placed in the Louvre. Napoleon took it away to hang in his bedroom, but it was returned to the Louvre afterwards. The theft of this fabulous object in 1911 created a media sensation. The police were as baffled as everyone else. It was thought that modernist enemies of traditional art must be involved and the avant-garde poet and playwright Guillaume Apollinaire was arrested in September and questioned for a week before being released.

Pablo Picasso was the next prominent suspect, but there was no evidence against him either. Two years went by before the true culprit was discovered, an Italian petty criminal called Vincenzo Perugia who had moved to Paris in 1908 and worked at the Louvre for a time. He went to the gallery in the white smock that all the employees there wore and hid until it closed for the night when he removed the Mona Lisa from its frame. When the gallery reopened he walked unobtrusively out with the painting under his smock, attracting no attention, and took it to his lodgings in Paris. It was not until November 1913, calling himself Leonardo Vincenzo, that Perugia wrote to an art dealer in Florence named Alfredo Geri offering to bring the painting to Italy for a reward of 500,000 lire. He travelled to Florence by train the following month, taking the Mona Lisa in a trunk, hidden beneath a false bottom. After booking into a hotel, which subsequently shrewdly changed its name to the Hotel La Gioconda, he took the painting to Geri’s gallery.

Geri persuaded him to leave it for expert examination and the police arrested Perugia later that day. Perugia apparently believed, entirely mistakenly, that the Mona Lisa had been stolen from Florence by Napoleon and that he deserved a reward for doing his patriotic duty and returning it to its true home in Italy. That was what he said, at least. Many Italians welcomed the masterpiece home; people flocked to see it for a time at the Uffizi Gallery, some of them weeping with joy, and Perugia served only a brief prison sentence. The great painting was duly returned to the Louvre and has hung there safely and enigmatically ever since. The Theft That Made The 'Mona Lisa' A Masterpiece : NPR The Theft That Made The 'Mona Lisa' A Masterpiece Embed Embed The Theft That Made The 'Mona Lisa' A Masterpiece The Theft That Made The 'Mona Lisa' A Masterpiece Embed Embed The right eye of Leonardo da Vinci's "Mona Lisa." On Aug. 21, 1911, the then-little-known painting was stolen from the wall of the Louvre in Paris. And a legend was born.

Associated Press hide caption toggle caption Associated Press The right eye of Leonardo da Vinci's "Mona Lisa." On Aug. 21, 1911, the then-little-known painting was stolen from the wall of the Louvre in Paris. And a legend was born. Associated Press If you were standing outside the Louvre in Paris on the morning of Aug. 21, 1911, you might have noticed three men hurrying out of the museum. They would have been pretty conspicuous on a quiet Monday morning, writer and historian James Zug tells weekends on All Things Considered host Guy Raz. "Sunday night was a big social night in Paris," he says, "so a lot of people were hung over on Monday morning." The men, three Italian handymen, were not hungover. But they might have been a little tired. They'd just spent the night in an art-supply closet. And on that morning, with the Louvre still closed, they slipped out of the closet and lifted 200 pounds of painting, frame and protective glass case off the wall.

Stripped of its frame and case, the wooden canvas was covered with a blanket and hustled off to the Quai d'Orsay station, where the trio boarded a 7:47 a.m. express train out of the city. They'd stolen the "Mona Lisa." Famous, Overnight Before its theft, the "Mona Lisa" was not widely known outside the art world. Leonardo da Vinci painted it in 1507, but it wasn't until the 1860s that critics began to hail it as a masterwork of Renaissance painting. And that judgment didn't filter outside a thin slice of French intelligentsia. Article continues after sponsorship "The 'Mona Lisa' wasn't even the most famous painting in its gallery, let alone in the Louvre," Zug says. Dorothy and Tom Hoobler wrote about the painting's heist in their book, The Crimes of Paris. It was 28 hours, they say, until anyone even noticed the four bare hooks. The guy who noticed was a pushy still-life artist who set up his easel to paint that gallery in the Louvre.

"He felt he couldn't work as long as the 'Mona Lisa' wasn't there," Tom Hoobler says. But the artist wasn't alarmed. At that time, there was a project under way to photograph the Louvre's many works. Each piece had to be taken to the roof, since cameras of the day did not work well inside. "So finally he persuaded a guard to go see how long the photographers were going to have the painting," Tom Hoobler says. "He went off and came back, and said, 'You know what, the photographers say they don't have it!' " All of a sudden, James Zug says, "the 'Mona Lisa' becomes this incredibly famous painting — literally overnight." A New York Times headline from August 24, 1911, reported the investigation into the disappearance of the "Mona Lisa." The New York Times hide caption toggle caption The New York Times A New York Times headline from August 24, 1911, reported the investigation into the disappearance of the "Mona Lisa." The New York Times Mark of Shame After the Louvre announced the theft, newspapers all over the world ran headlines about the missing masterpiece.

" 60 Detectives Seek Stolen 'Mona Lisa,' French Public Indignant ," the New York Times declared. The heist had become something of a national scandal. "In France, there was a great deal of concern that American millionaires were buying up the legacy of France — the best paintings," Dorothy Hoobler says. At one point, American tycoon and art lover J.P. Morgan was suspected of commissioning the theft. Pablo Picasso was also considered a suspect, and was questioned. And as tensions were escalating between France and Germany ahead of World War I, "there were people who thought the Kaiser was behind it," Hoobler says. After a weeklong shutdown, the Louvre re-opened to mobs of people, Franz Kafka among them, all rushing to see the empty spot that had become a "mark of shame" for Parisians. Meanwhile, the thieves had made a clean getaway. They were three Italians: two brothers, Vincenzo and Michele Lancelotti, and the ringleader, Vincenzo Perugia.

He was a handyman who had worked for the Louvre to install the very same protective glass cases he had ripped from the "Mona Lisa." Perugia hoped to sell the painting. But the heist had received so much attention that the "Mona Lisa" became too hot to hock, Zug says. "Within days, newspapers were offering rewards. [Perugia] could have brought it in, but I think the main reason he didn't do that is he was worried about being arrested — and that the story was so big that he probably didn't think he could get away with it." So Perugia stashed it in the false bottom of a trunk in his Paris boardinghouse. Of the more than 35,000 works of art in the Louvre, perhaps none is more popular than the Mona Lisa. KIKE CALVO/AP hide caption toggle caption KIKE CALVO/AP Of the more than 35,000 works of art in the Louvre, perhaps none is more popular than the Mona Lisa.

KIKE CALVO/AP A Masterpiece Returned Twenty-eight months after he snatched it from the Louvre, Perugia finally made a pass at selling the "Mona Lisa" to an art dealer in Florence. But the dealer was suspicious. He had the head of an Italian art gallery come take a look at the painting. A stamp on the back confirmed its authenticity. "They said, 'OK, leave it with us, and we'll see that you get a reward,'" Tom Hoobler says. Perugia went back home. But half an hour later, to his surprise, the police were at his door. "He said later that he was trying to return it to Italy — that he was a patriot and it was stolen by Napoleon — and he was trying to return it to the land of his birth," James Zug says. And so, with much fanfare, the painting was returned to the Louvre. Perugia pleaded guilty to stealing it, and was sentenced to just eight months in prison. But a few days after his trial, Dorothy Hoobler says, World War I broke out. Suddenly, the drama of an art heist was off the front pages. "This seemed like a very small story," she says.

James Zug recently wrote about the Mona Lisa for the Smithsonian Magazine. Mona Lisa: The theft that created a legend - CNN.com Mona Lisa: The theft that created a legend By Sheena McKenzie, for CNN Updated 7:26 AM ET, Tue November 19, 2013 Chat with us in Facebook Messenger. Find out what's happening in the world as it unfolds. Photos: 100th anniversary: The Mona Lisa is recovered Mona Lisa recovered 100 years ago – More than 100 years ago, in August 1911, the Mona Lisa was stolen off the walls of the Louvre in Paris. The famous Leonardo da Vinci painting wasn't recovered until two years later, in December 1913. Hide Caption 1 of 22 Photos: 100th anniversary: The Mona Lisa is recovered Mona Lisa recovered 100 years ago – Vincenzo Peruggia, the Italian handyman who stole the Mona Lisa, had trouble with the law before -- once for attempting to rob a prostitute and once for carrying a gun during a fistfight.

Hide Caption 2 of 22 Photos: 100th anniversary: The Mona Lisa is recovered Mona Lisa recovered 100 years ago – This reconstruction shows how Peruggia perpetrated the greatest art theft of the 20th century. After hiding in a closet overnight, he simply removed the painting, hid it under his smock and walked out with it under his arm. Hide Caption 3 of 22 Photos: 100th anniversary: The Mona Lisa is recovered Mona Lisa recovered 100 years ago – Peruggia encountered a locked door as he tried to leave through the Visconti courtyard. He desperately removed the doorknob, to no avail. Then a plumber who was passing by opened the door with a key. Hide Caption 4 of 22 Photos: 100th anniversary: The Mona Lisa is recovered Mona Lisa recovered 100 years ago – It would be 24 hours before someone noticed the painting was missing. Artwork was often removed to be photographed or cleaned.

Hide Caption 5 of 22 Photos: 100th anniversary: The Mona Lisa is recovered Mona Lisa recovered 100 years ago – Achille Beltrame illustrated the theft in September 1911. "The Louvre had over 400 rooms but only 200 guards and even fewer on duty overnight," said Noah Charney, professor of art history and author of "The Thefts of the Mona Lisa." "There were basically no alarms in play." Hide Caption 6 of 22 Photos: 100th anniversary: The Mona Lisa is recovered Mona Lisa recovered 100 years ago – A man in Paris offers the score of "Did you? Mona Lisa!!" It was a satirical song about the theft. Hide Caption 7 of 22 Photos: 100th anniversary: The Mona Lisa is recovered Mona Lisa recovered 100 years ago – Seen here is Peruggia's apartment in Paris, where Peruggia hid the Mona Lisa in a false bottom of a wooden trunk.

Hide Caption 8 of 22 Photos: 100th anniversary: The Mona Lisa is recovered Mona Lisa recovered 100 years ago – Police ransacked Peruggia's apartment in 1911 looking for the stolen painting. They didn't find it. Hide Caption 9 of 22 Photos: 100th anniversary: The Mona Lisa is recovered Mona Lisa recovered 100 years ago – The poet Guillaume Apollinaire was arrested September 7, 1911, and jailed on suspicion of the Mona Lisa's theft. He was released five days later because prosecutors didn't have the evidence to build a case. Hide Caption 10 of 22 Photos: 100th anniversary: The Mona Lisa is recovered Mona Lisa recovered 100 years ago – Spanish painter Pablo Picasso was also questioned by police after buying two stone statues from Apollinaire's secretary, Josephe-Honoré Géry Pieret. Once Pieret admitted to stealing the statues from the Louvre in 1907, Apollinaire and Picasso returned them.

Hide Caption 11 of 22 Photos: 100th anniversary: The Mona Lisa is recovered Mona Lisa recovered 100 years ago – The Titanic sank on April 14, 1912, and focus shifted away from the failed investigation of the Mona Lisa theft. The trail had gone cold, and it was reported that the painting had been shipped out of France. Hide Caption 12 of 22 Photos: 100th anniversary: The Mona Lisa is recovered Mona Lisa recovered 100 years ago – The Hotel Tripoli-Italia, now called the Hotel La Gioconda, is where Peruggia showed the stolen painting to art dealer Alfredo Geri and Uffizi Gallery director Giovanni Poggi in Florence, Italy, on December 10, 1913. Peruggia, who claimed to have stolen the Mona Lisa to return her to her native Italy, was arrested and eventually sentenced to jail. Hide Caption 13 of 22 Photos: 100th anniversary: The Mona Lisa is recovered Mona Lisa recovered 100 years ago – After Peruggia's arrest, the Mona Lisa was displayed for a week in the Uffizi.

Hide Caption 14 of 22 Photos: 100th anniversary: The Mona Lisa is recovered Mona Lisa recovered 100 years ago – The painting was displayed throughout Italy before it was returned to the Louvre in January 1914. Hide Caption 15 of 22 Photos: 100th anniversary: The Mona Lisa is recovered Mona Lisa recovered 100 years ago – Guards and a barrier of benches surround the Mona Lisa at the Museum of the Offices of Florence in 1913. Hide Caption 16 of 22 Photos: 100th anniversary: The Mona Lisa is recovered Mona Lisa recovered 100 years ago – This drawing, on the December 28, 1913, issue of Le Petit Journal, shows Da Vinci showing the Mona Lisa to King Francois I. Below that are drawings of the painting's theft and recovery. Hide Caption Photos: 100th anniversary: The Mona Lisa is recovered Mona Lisa recovered 100 years ago – Peruggia appears in a Florence courtroom in June 1914.

Hide Caption 18 of 22 Photos: 100th anniversary: The Mona Lisa is recovered Mona Lisa recovered 100 years ago – After being found guilty, Peruggia served seven months in jail. Hide Caption 19 of 22 Photos: 100th anniversary: The Mona Lisa is recovered Mona Lisa recovered 100 years ago – Two men carry the Mona Lisa back to the Louvre in January 1914. Hide Caption 20 of 22 Photos: 100th anniversary: The Mona Lisa is recovered Mona Lisa recovered 100 years ago – The Orens caricature "The return of the Mona Lisa" refers to the theft and recovery of the famous painting. Hide Caption 21 of 22 Photos: 100th anniversary: The Mona Lisa is recovered Mona Lisa recovered 100 years ago – The Mona Lisa appears in the Louvre in 1929. Today, she is the jewel in the museum's crown, helping attract millions of visitors each year.

Hide Caption Art's Great Whodunit: The Theft of the Mona Lisa in 1911 - TIME Follow @TIME Even at the beginning of the 20th century  before mass reproductions, package tours to France and The Da Vinci Code  Mona Lisa was different from other pictures. The woman with the enigmatic smile got so many love letters that her portrait was the only artwork at the Louvre to have its own mailbox. A heartbroken suitor once shot himself to death in front of her. So is it any surprise that somebody finally eloped with her? On the morning of Aug. 21, 1911, Mona Lisa  arguably the world's most famous picture  was stolen from the Louvre. Who took her, how and why, is all part of the story told in two new books this spring. Vanished Smile: The Mysterious Theft of Mona Lisa by R.A. Scotti (Knopf; 239 pages) sticks closely to the case and relates it luxuriously. In places it reads like a prose poem with narrative gallop.

The Crimes of Paris: A True Story of Murder, Theft, and Detection by Dorothy and Thomas Hoobler (Little, Brown; 376 pages) embeds the theft within more workmanlike prose and the larger story of how Paris police were struggling in the early 20th century against a world of gangsters and anarchists. Unfortunately, the authors of both books have decided to pad out their texts by resurrecting an utterly unsubstantiated version of who might have been behind the heist. ( The Mona Lisa mystery: Pregnant? Disgusted? ) What we know is this: In the early morning hours of a Monday morning, before the Louvre was opened for visitors, Mona Lisa was stolen by a thief who acted quickly when no guards were around. The theft didn't even come to light until the next day. (Guards who noticed that the painting was missing assumed it had been removed to be photographed.) Once museum officials realized the truth, the Louvre was shut down. Police arrived to question the staff, re-enact the crime and dust for fingerprints, a new crime-fighting technique in those days. The French border was sealed and departing ships and trains searched.

By the time the museum re-opened nine days later, the theft was front-page news around the world. Tips were pouring in from amateur detectives, nutty professors and clairvoyants. Thousands of people lined up at the Louvre just to see the empty spot where the painting once hung. Among them was Franz Kafka, who was visiting Paris and whose cameo in this story, of course, makes it all the more Kafkaesque. See the world's most influential people in the 2009 TIME 100. A little more than a week after the robbery, the plot thickened considerably when a mysterious character got in touch with Paris-Journal, a newspaper that was offering a reward for information about the crime. Soon the man showed up at the newspaper's offices with a small statue, one of several that he claimed to have stolen four years earlier from the Louvre. The anonymous thief turned out to be a bisexual con man named Honoré Joseph Géry Pieret. He had once served as "secretary," and perhaps other roles, for Guillaume Apollinaire, the poet and art-world polemicist who was Picasso's constant supporter in the public skirmishes over modern art in the French press.

Before long, Pieret had implicated Apollinaire in the thefts. When police arrested Apollinaire, he admitted under pressure that Pieret had sold the pilfered works to none other than Picasso. Thinking they had found their way into a crime ring that might be behind the Mona Lisa case, the cops then dragged Picasso before a magistrate for questioning. Picasso, who at 29 had just begun the transition from bohemia to the haute bourgeoisie, was terrified. He was a foreigner in France; any serious trouble with the law could get him deported. And this could have gotten serious, because the accusation was true. Four years earlier, he had bought from Pieret two of the pilfered sculptures, Roman-era Iberian heads whose thick features and wide eyes he would introduce into the great painting he was then just about to embark upon, Les Demoiselles d'Avignon. Though he would deny it in court, he almost certainly knew at the time that both heads were lifted from the Louvre. He may even have pushed Pieret to take them in the first place. But prosecutors couldn't build a case that either Picasso or Apollinaire had stolen the heads, much less the Mona Lisa, and both of them went free.

After that, for years the trail went cold. Mona Lisa was reported to have been shipped to Switzerland or South America. She was in an apartment in the Bronx, a private gallery in St. Petersburg or a secret room in the mansion of J.P. Morgan. In fact, she had never left Paris. The thief turned out to be Vincenzo Peruggia  the Hooblers spell it Perugia  an Italian house painter and carpenter living in France, though he was arrested for the crime  in December 1913  in Florence. He had gone there with the painting after contacting a Florentine art dealer, Alfredo Geri, who he hoped would help him dispose of his hostage in a way that would bring him some cash. Geri played along, and even brought in the director of the Uffizi Gallery to authenticate the picture on the spot. When they were satisfied that Peruggia had brought them the real thing, they turned him over to the police. The whole episode proved embarrassing for France.

Peruggia had escaped the dragnet of French police, despite the fact that he had once worked at the Louvre, knew the exits and escape routes and had even helped build the glass-enclosed frame Mona Lisa was displayed in  so on the fateful morning he knew how to get her out of it quickly. Then he spirited her back to his shabby apartment and flung her like Patty Hearst into a dark closet, which is where she remained for more than two years. Though there's evidence that Peruggia tried repeatedly to sell the picture, he always insisted that his only motive in stealing Mona Lisa was to return it in glory to Italy and to exact revenge for Napoleon's massive theft of artworks all across Europe. One problem: Mona Lisa had never been part of the Napoleonic plunder. Though Leonardo had begun the painting in Florence in 1503, he took it with him to France 13 years later when he resettled at the court of the French king François I. After his death there in 1519, the painting passed through several hands until an eager François bought it for the modern equivalent of around $10 million.

Peruggia's patriotic rationale made him a hero in the Italian press, but it didn't persuade an Italian jury, which convicted him in August 1914. His sentence was reduced to time served. Eventually he moved back to France and opened a paint store in Haute-Savoie. Mona Lisa meanwhile was permitted by France to go on a triumphal tour of Italy before she returned home. Though no one doubts that it was Peruggia who actually stole the painting, to this day there are questions as to whether he had help that night or if he was working for bigger operators. This is where both books dive headfirst into a huge pile of baloney. In 1932 a swashbuckling American journalist named Karl Decker published a piece in the Saturday Evening Post, in which he wrote that in 1914 in Morocco, he met an aristocratic con man, Marqués Eduardo de Valfierno, who told him that he had masterminded the theft as part of a scheme to sell six meticulously forged versions of Mona Lisa to six gullible millionaires. Each would be duped into believing he had secretly bought the picture that had just been famously stolen from the Louvre.

But in order to carry out the scam, it was necessary to pull off a highly publicized theft of the real picture. De Valfierno claimed that the scheme netted him millions, and that Peruggia has been well paid for his part, but had kept the original, thinking he could sell that too. All of this is fun to imagine, but garbage. Almost a century after the crime, none of the six alleged copies has turned up. Did de Valfierno even exist, or was he a fiction created by Decker in his declining years to sell a magazine story? Who knows, but all these years later, authors with a book to market still play footsie with Decker's wholly unsubstantiated story. The Hooblers retell the Decker tale in their last chapter, then lamely attach a disclaimer: "There is no external confirmation for it. Yet it has frequently been assumed to be true by authors writing about the case." But naturally when their book was excerpted in Vanity Fair this month, it was the Decker story that occupied most of the excerpt, with the Hooblers' shrugging disclaimer tacked at the end.

No matter, within days a blog on the Boston Herald website was reporting that the Hoobler's book "reveals" that de Valfierno commissioned the theft. What Scotti does with the story is no better. She opens Vanished Smile with the Marqués arriving in the U.S. to peddle his forgeries, a gimmick that will lead unsuspecting readers to suppose that this imaginary character will somehow turn out to be the real man behind the crime. But the Marqués disappears from her book until the final chapter, where Scotti lays out Decker's account and then details the reasons why it's probably hooey. Scotti is right about one thing. The huge publicity surrounding the theft helped to launch Leonardo's great painting into the stratosphere of fame. "Mona Lisa left the Louvre a work of art," Scotti writes. "She returned an icon." Truer to say she returned a pop-culture celebrity, the kind who's helpless to stop the world from spreading loose talk about her. That's a temptation neither of these books was able to resist. The Day the Mona Lisa Was Stolen The Day the Mona Lisa Was Stolen Sign Up for Our Free Newsletters Thanks, You're in!

Health Tip of the Day Recipe of the Day There was an error. Please try again. Please select a newsletter. Please enter a valid email address. Did you mean ? The famous Leonardo Da Vinci painting "The Mona Lisa" is seen on display in the Grande Galerie of the Louvre museum in Paris, France. (Pascal Le Segretain/Staff / Getty Images) Updated December 08, 2016. On August 21, 1911, Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa, one of the most famous paintings in the world, was stolen right off the wall of the Louvre (famous museum in Paris, France). It was such an inconceivable crime, that the Mona Lisa wasn't even noticed missing until the following day. Who would steal such a famous painting? Why did they do it? Was the Mona Lisa lost forever? The Discovery Everyone had been talking about the glass panes that museum officials at the Louvre had put in front of several of their most important paintings. Museum officials stated it was to help protect the paintings, especially because of recent acts of vandalism. The public and the press thought the glass was too reflective.

Louis Béroud, a painter, decided to join in the debate by painting a young French girl fixing her hair in the reflection from the pane of glass in front of the Mona Lisa. continue reading below our video 10 Facts About the Titanic That You Don't Know On Tuesday, August 22, 1911, Béroud walked into the Louvre and went to the Salon Carré where the Mona Lisa had been on display for five years. But on the wall where the Mona Lisa used to hang, in between Correggio's Mystical Marriage and Titian's Allegory of Alfonso d'Avalos, sat only four iron pegs. Béroud contacted the section head of the guards, who thought the painting must be at the photographers'. A few hours later, Béroud checked back with the section head. It was then discovered the Mona Lisa was not with the photographers. The section chief and other guards did a quick search of the museum—no Mona Lisa. Since Théophile Homolle, the museum director, was on vacation, the curator of Egyptian antiquities was contacted. He, in turn, called the Paris police. About 60 investigators were sent over to the Louvre shortly after noon.

They closed the museum and slowly let out the visitors. They then continued the search. It was finally determined that it was true— the Mona Lisa had been stolen. The Louvre was closed for an entire week to aid the investigation. When it was reopened, a line of people had come to solemnly stare at the empty space on the wall, where the Mona Lisa had once hung. An anonymous visitor left a bouquet of flowers.1 "[Y]ou might as well pretend that one could steal the towers of the cathedral of Notre Dame," stated Théophile Homolle, museum director of the Louvre, approximately a year before the theft.2 (He was forced to resign soon after the robbery.) The Clues Unfortunately, there wasn't much evidence to go on. The most important discovery was found on the first day of the investigation. About an hour after the 60 investigators began searching the Louvre, they found the controversial plate of glass and Mona Lisa's frame lying in a staircase. The frame, an ancient one donated by Countess de Béarn two years prior, had not been damaged.

Investigators and others speculated that the thief grabbed the painting off the wall, entered the stairwell, removed the painting from its frame, then somehow left the museum unnoticed. But when did all this take place? Investigators began to interview guards and workers to determine when the Mona Lisa went missing. One worker remembered having seen the painting around 7 o'clock on Monday morning (a day before it was discovered missing), but noticed it gone when he walked by the Salon Carré an hour later. He had assumed a museum official had moved it. Further research discovered that the usual guard in the Salon Carré was home (one of his children had the measles) and his replacement admitted leaving his post for a few minutes around 8 o'clock to smoke a cigarette. All of this evidence pointed to the theft occurring somewhere between 7:00 and 8:30 on Monday morning. But on Mondays, the Louvre was closed for cleaning. So, was this an inside job? Approximately 800 people had access to the Salon Carré on Monday morning. Wandering throughout the museum were museum officials, guards, workmen, cleaners and photographers. Interviews with these people brought out very little.

One person thought they had seen a stranger hanging out, but he was unable to match the stranger's face with photos at the police station. The investigators brought in Alphonse Bertillon, a famous fingerprint expert. He found a thumbprint on the Mona Lisa's frame, but he was unable to match it with any in his files. There was a scaffold against one side of the museum that was there to aid the installation of an elevator. This could have given access to a would-be thief to the museum. Besides believing that the thief had to have at least some internal knowledge of the museum, there really wasn't much evidence. So, who dunnit? Prev Who stole the Mona Lisa? Add to myFT Who stole the Mona Lisa? The theft of the world’s most famous portrait from the Louvre 100 years ago was not only the art heist of the century. It confirmed that this picture of a smiling woman was far more than a painting Read next August 5, 2011 by: Simon Kuper On Monday morning, August 21 1911, inside the Louvre museum in Paris, a plumber named Sauvet came upon an unidentified man stuck in front of a locked door.

The man – wearing a white smock, like all the Louvre’s maintenance staff – pointed out to Sauvet that the doorknob was missing. The helpful Sauvet opened the door with his key and some pliers. The man walked out of the museum and into the Parisian heatwave. Hidden under his smock was Leonardo da Vinci’s “Mona Lisa”. The art theft of the century helped make the Mona Lisa what she is today. The world’s popular newspapers – a new phenomenon in 1911 – and the French police searched everywhere for the culprit. At one point they even suspected Pablo Picasso. Only one person was ever arrested for the crime in France: the poet Guillaume Apollinaire. But the police found the thief only when he finally outed himself. Stealing “La Joconde” – the woman in the portrait is probably the Florentine silk merchant’s wife Lisa del Giocondo – was not particularly difficult. The main thing it took was nerve. Like the Louvre’s other paintings, she was barely guarded. She wasn’t fixed to the wall. The Louvre was closed on Mondays. August is Paris’s quietest month. On that particular Monday morning, the few caretakers were mostly busy cleaning.

At 7.20am the thief was probably hiding in the storage closet where he may have spent the night. All he had to do was wait until the elderly ex-soldier who was guarding several rooms had wandered off, then lift the frame off its hooks, remove the frame from the painting, and shove the wooden panel on which Da Vinci had painted under his smock. The thief had chosen the Mona Lisa partly because she was so small: just 53cm x 77cm. His one stumble was finding the door to his escape locked. He had already removed the doorknob with a screwdriver before the plumber arrived to save him. By 8.30am, Mona Lisa was gone. Twelve hours later, writes the French author Jérôme Coignard in Une femme disparaît , one of several books on the crime, the caretaker in charge reported that everything was normal. Even the next morning, Tuesday, nobody had yet noticed Mona Lisa’s absence. Paintings in the Louvre often disappeared briefly. The museum’s photographers were free to take works to their studio at will, without signing them out.

The gap in the Louvre’s display left by the Mona Lisa When the painter Louis Béroud arrived in the Louvre’s Salon Carré on Tuesday morning to sketch the Mona Lisa, and found only four iron hooks in the wall, he presumed the photographers had her. Béroud joked with the guard: “Of course Paupardin, when women are not with their lovers, they are apt to be with their photographers.” But when Mona Lisa was still absent at 11am, Béroud sent Paupardin to ask the photographers when she would be back, recounts the American author R.A. Scotti in her excellent recent account, Vanished Smile . The photographers said they hadn’t taken her and the alarm was raised. In the corner of a service stairway, police found the glass box that had contained the painting, and the frame donated two years earlier by the Comtesse de Béarn. The newspapers put the theft on their front pages. “We still have the frame,” added the Petit Parisien daily in a sarcastic strapline. The far-right Action Française newspaper blamed the Jews.

Critics had pointed out the lack of security, but the museum had taken only a few eccentric corrective measures: teaching the elderly guards judo, for instance. Jean Théophile Homolle, director of all France’s national museums, had assured the press before leaving on his summer holidays that the Louvre was secure. “You might as well pretend that one could steal the towers of the cathedral of Notre-Dame,” he said. After the theft, the French journalist Francis Charmes would comment: “La Joconde was stolen because nobody believed she could be.” “Some judges regard the painting as the finest existing,” noted The New York Times. But even before Mona Lisa disappeared she was more than a painting. Leonardo’s feat was to have made her almost a person. “Mona Lisa is painted at eye level and almost life-size, both disconcertingly real and transcendent,” writes Scotti. Many romantics responded to the picture as if to a woman. Mona Lisa received love letters and was given a touch more surveillance than the Louvre’s other works, because some visitors stared at the “aphrodisiac” painting and became “visibly emotional”, writes Coignard.

In 1910, one lover had shot himself before her eyes. After the theft, a French psychology professor suggested that the thief might be a sexual psychopath who would enjoy “mutilating, stabbing, defiling” Mona Lisa. But nobody knew who the thief was, nor how he would profit from his haul. Monsieur Bénédite, the Louvre’s assistant curator, told The New York Times: “Why the theft was committed is a mystery to me, as I consider the picture valueless in the hands of a private individual.” If you had the Mona Lisa, what could you do with her? A British newspaper cutting from December 1913, reporting the discovery of the painting in Florence. The stricken Louvre closed for a week, but when it reopened, on Tuesday August 29, queues formed outside for the first time ever. People were streaming in to see the empty space where Mona Lisa had hung. Unwittingly, Coignard writes, the Louvre was exhibiting the first conceptual installation in the history of art: the absence of a painting. Among the many who saw it were two Prague writers travelling through Europe on the cheap: Max Brod and Franz Kafka.

On their travels they had had a brilliant idea: to write a series of guidebooks (On the Cheap in Switzerland, On the Cheap in Paris, etcetera) for other budget travellers. Kafka always was ahead of his time. Meanwhile, the Mona Lisa was becoming a sensation. “In a thousand years,” wrote the Da Vinci-devotee Joséphin Péladan, “people will ask of the year 1911: ‘what did you do with the Joconde?’” Scotti writes: “Chorus lines made up with the face of Mona Lisa danced topless in the cabarets of Paris … Comedians asked, ‘Will the Eiffel Tower be next?’” The painting was celebrated in new popular songs (“It couldn’t be stolen, we guard her all the time, except on Mondays”). Mona Lisa postcards sold in unprecedented numbers worldwide. Her face advertised everything from cigarettes (“I only smoke Zigomar”) to corsets. In fact, no painting had ever previously been reproduced on such a scale. As Scotti said, she had suddenly become both “high culture” and “a staple of consumer culture”.

The Dutch painter Kees van Dongen was one of the few to puncture the hype: “She has no eyebrows and a funny smile. She must have had nasty teeth to smile so tightly.” The French police were under international pressure to find the thief. All they had to go on was a fingerprint he had left on the wall, and the doorknob he had thrown into a ditch outside. Sauvet, the plumber who had let him out, was shown countless photographs of Louvre employees past and present, but could not recognise the thief. Employees and ex-employees were interrogated and fingerprinted – a newfangled technique in 1911 – but nobody’s print matched the thief’s. The Parisian police suspected the heist must be the work of a sophisticated ring of art thieves. In late August, they thought they had found them. A bisexual Belgian adventurer named Honoré Joseph Géry Pieret had appeared at the offices of Le Journal, and sold the newspaper an Iberian statuette that he had previously stolen from the Louvre. He also talked of having stolen a statue of a woman’s head from the museum, and having sold it to a painter friend.

If these crooks had taken the statuettes, the police reasoned, they probably had the Mona Lisa too. Géry often stayed in Paris with his friend Apollinaire, the poet, who had once called for the Louvre to be burned down. Apollinaire and Picasso were chums. After Géry’s revelations, the two men panicked. Picasso still kept two ancient Iberian statuettes, stolen by Géry, in his cupboard in Montmartre. In fact he had used the heads as models for a brothel scene he had painted in 1907. “‘ Les Demoiselles d’Avignon ’ was the first picture to bear the mark of cubism,” Picasso recounted years later. “You will recall the affair in which I was involved when Apollinaire stole some statuettes from the Louvre? They were Iberian statuettes … Well, if you look at the ears of Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, you will recognise the ears of those pieces of sculpture!” Perhaps he had even commissioned Géry’s theft with the Demoiselles in mind.

At midnight on September 5, Picasso and Apollinaire sneaked out of Picasso’s apartment and lugged the statuettes for miles in a suitcase across Paris. They had agreed to dump them into the River Seine. But, writes Scotti, in the end they didn’t dare. On September 7, detectives arrested Apollinaire. He broke down and named Picasso. Both men cried under interrogation. Yet in court Picasso contradicted everything he had told police, and swore ignorance of the whole business. Shown Apollinaire, he said: “I have never seen him before.” Eventually the police gave up on them. Vincenzo Peruggia’s one-room apartment in Paris In December 1912 the Louvre hung a portrait by Raphael on its blank wall. The Mona Lisa had been given up for dead. The world had mostly forgotten her when on November 29 1913 an antique dealer in Florence named Alfredo Geri received a letter postmarked Poste Restante, Place de la République, Paris. The author, who signed himself “Leonardo”, wrote: “The stolen work of Leonardo da Vinci is in my possession.

It seems to belong to Italy since its painter was an Italian.” Geri showed the letter to Giovanni Poggi, director of Florence’s Uffizi gallery. Then Geri replied to “Leonardo”. After some toing-and-froing, “Leonardo” said it would be no trouble for him to bring the painting to Florence. Geri’s shop was just a few streets from where Da Vinci had painted the Mona Lisa 400 years before. On the evening of December 10 “Leonardo” unexpectedly walked in. He was a tiny man, just 5ft 3in tall, with a waxed moustache. When Geri asked whether his Mona Lisa was real, “Leonardo” replied that he had stolen her from the wall of the Louvre himself. He said he wanted to “return” her to Italy in exchange for 500,000 lire in “expenses”. He had only 1.95 French francs in his pocket. Geri arranged to come with Poggi to see the painting in “Leonardo’s” room in the Tripoli-Italia hotel the next day. They went up to room 20 on the third floor.

Leonardo locked the door, dragged a case from under his bed, rummaged in it, threw out some junk, pulled out a package, and unwrapped it to reveal the Mona Lisa. The three men agreed that Poggi and Geri would take the painting to the Uffizi to authenticate it. On their way out the two were stopped by an alert hotel clerk, who thought they were stealing a painting from the hotel wall. At the Uffizi, Poggi established from the pattern of cracks in the painting that it was the real thing. When news reached the Italian parliament – “The Mona Lisa has been found!” – a fist-fight between deputies immediately turned into embraces, writes Scotti. The Mona Lisa had spent two years on Peruggia’s kitchen table. ‘I fell in love with her,’ he said from jail After handing over the painting, “Leonardo” had calmly gone sightseeing in Florence. But to his surprise, he was arrested in his hotel room by Italian police. As Monsieur Bénédite of the Louvre had warned, the picture had proven valueless in the hands of a private individual.

The thief turned out to be Vincenzo Peruggia, a 32-year-old Italian who lived in Paris. He was a house painter-cum-glazier. He suffered from lead poisoning. He lived in one room at 5 rue de l’Hôpital Saint-Louis, in a neighbourhood of eastern Paris that even today, a century on, is largely immigrant and not entirely gentrified. The Mona Lisa had spent two years mostly on his kitchen table. “I fell in love with her,” Peruggia said from jail, repeating the romantic cliché. The court-appointed psychiatrist diagnosed him as “mentally deficient”. The French police really ought to have found him. Peruggia had briefly worked in the Louvre. In fact, he had made the Mona Lisa’s glass frame – the very one he had removed that August morning. A detective had even visited his apartment, but had failed to spot the painting. Moreover, Peruggia had two previous criminal convictions for minor incidents (one a scuffle with a prostitute) so the police had his fingerprints. Unfortunately, the famous detective Alphonse Bertillon – the real-life French Sherlock Holmes – who was on the Mona Lisa case, only catalogued the right fingerprints of suspects.

Peruggia had left his left print on the Louvre’s wall. Vincenzo Peruggia’s police record He was locked up until his trial began in Florence on June 4 1914. Questioned by police, journalists, and later in court, Peruggia gave varying contradictory accounts of how exactly he had got in and out of the Louvre. He had walked out, carrying the painting, “with the greatest nonchalance”, he told the court. He said he had initially got on the wrong bus, and had finally taken the Mona Lisa home in a taxi. Under questioning, Peruggia emerged as the kind of disgruntled immigrant who in a different time and a different place might have turned to terrorism instead of art theft. In Paris he had often been insulted as a “macaroni”. French people had stolen from him, and put salt and pepper in his wine. When he had mentioned to a colleague at the Louvre that the museum’s most esteemed paintings were Italian, the colleague had chuckled. Peruggia had once seen a picture of Napoleon’s troops carting stolen Italian art to France.

He said he had become determined to return at least one stolen painting, the handily portable Mona Lisa, to Italy. In fact, he was labouring under a gargantuan misapprehension: the French hadn’t stolen the Mona Lisa at all. Da Vinci had spent his final years in France. His last patron, the French king François I, had bought the painting, apparently legally, for 4,000 gold crowns. After Peruggia’s arrest there had been a brief flare-up of patriotic “peruggisme” in Italy, but it soon died down. Most people were disappointed in Peruggia’s calibre. He was more Lee Harvey Oswald than the criminal mastermind they had imagined. “He was, quite clearly, a classic loser,” says Donald Sassoon in his book Becoming Mona Lisa . Despite Peruggia’s claims to patriotism – “I am an Italian and I do not want the picture given back to the Louvre” – it emerged in court that he had visited London to try to flog the painting to the dealer Duveen, who had laughed at him. The mention of this story prompted Peruggia’s only show of anger during the trial.

He had previously described the attempted sale himself, but in court he loudly denied it. One judge said, “Nevertheless, your unselfishness wasn’t total. You did expect some benefit from restoration.” “Ah, benefit, benefit,” sighed Peruggia. “Certainly something better than what happened to me here.” The courtroom laughed. Yet he had compiled lists of dealers and art collectors, who, he presumably hoped, might buy his painting. He had also written to his family in Italy saying that soon he would be rich. (“Romantic words, your honour,” Peruggia explained in court.) Joe Medeiros, an American filmmaker who is finishing a documentary about the theft, believes Peruggia was motivated chiefly by an immigrant’s pride. “He was a guy who wasn’t typically respected,” says Medeiros, “and I think he thought he was better than he was given credit for, so he set out to prove it. And I guess in some strange, perverse way he did prove it. He wasn’t as dumb as people thought.” Peruggia was lucky to be tried in Italy rather than France.

In Italy, his lawyer said in his closing argument, to applause from spectators and tears from the defendant, “there is nobody who desires the condemnation of the accused”. Nobody had lost anything from the theft, the lawyer pointed out. Mona Lisa had been recovered. She was now more famous than ever. She had made a brief, joyous tour of Italy before returning to the Louvre. Relations between Italy and France had improved. Peruggia received a sentence of one year and 15 days in jail. Some weeks later, on July 29, it was reduced to seven months and nine days. He was released at once because of time served. By then, in any case, the world had bigger things to worry about. While Peruggia was on trial, the Austrian archduke Franz Ferdinand had been assassinated in Sarajevo. On July 28 Austro-Hungary had declared war on Serbia. The Great War was starting. The theft and return of Mona Lisa was one of the last happy stories Europe would enjoy for another 30 years. Freed, Peruggia returned to the hotel where he had met Geri, and found that it had already been renamed La Gioconda.

(It still exists under the same name today.) Peruggia served in the Italian army during the first world war, but later returned to France and opened a paint shop in a village in Haute-Savoie. He died there on his 44th birthday in 1925, perhaps from the consequences of lead poisoning. He left a wife and baby daughter (who herself died in Italy this March, aged 86). The public never noticed his death. The only obituaries to the thief of the Mona Lisa appeared, mistakenly, in 1947, when another Vincenzo Peruggia died in France. It’s not that the Mona Lisa is better than other paintings. But they are paintings and she is a person The feeling never quite passed that the Mona Lisa deserved a more impressive thief. In 1932 the famous American journalist Karl Decker supplied one. Decker, in his younger years an inventive reporter for the Hearst newspapers, published an article in the Saturday Evening Post headlined, “Why and How the Mona Lisa Was Stolen”. Decker said he had waited so long to publish because he had promised his source he would reveal all only after the source’s death.

In 1914 in Casablanca, wrote Decker, he had run into an old friend, an Argentine conman known as the Marques de Valfierno. Over brandies, the Marques had told Decker that Peruggia had merely been an agent in the Marques’ own perfect crime. First the Marques had had a French master-forger, Chaudron, make six copies of the Mona Lisa. The Marques had openly shipped them to the US. Then he arranged for Peruggia to nab the Mona Lisa. After that, the Marques had sold the six copies secretly to American collectors, for millions of dollars each, pretending each time that the copy was the real Mona Lisa. The only flaw in the plan, the Marques had told Decker, was that that fool Peruggia had then tried to flog the actual painting. Officials gather as the Mona Lisa is returned to the Louvre in January 1914 Here at last was a criminal brain worthy of the Mona Lisa. The only problem is that Decker almost certainly invented him. There is no external evidence for Decker’s story, nor even for the Marques’ existence.

A century later, none of the six supposed copies has surfaced. Most likely, Vincenzo Peruggia stole the Mona Lisa single-handed, largely because she was small. The other day I went to the Louvre to see the Mona Lisa. I wasn’t the only one. From the moment you enter the museum, you see signs pointing to her smiling face (or as W. Somerset Maugham called it, “the insipid smile of that prim and sex-starved young woman”). You walk into the room where she hangs and find a ruck of a couple of hundred people, their backs to you, many with mobile phones above their heads taking photographs. Somewhere in the distance is a surprisingly small picture of a smiling woman, mostly obscured by phones. She is behind a frame and a second plate of glass, which protects her but also distorts her colours. Her beauty is lost. Unless you are a connoisseur of mob scenes, there is little here to enjoy. You envy Peruggia his time alone with her in his room two miles from here. You can see the Louvre’s strategy. It has sacrificed the Mona Lisa for the museum.

By guiding visitors towards the painting, it pockets their €10 yet keeps a swathe of them away from the rest of the collection. Most of the Louvre is relatively calm. Other great works, many of them looted at considerable effort by Napoleon, draw little attention. You can stand alone admiring Raphaels for a minute or two at a time. It’s not that the Mona Lisa is better than the museum’s other paintings. The point is that they are paintings and she is a person. That’s partly because of Da Vinci’s genius, and partly because of the myth that has grown up around her. It’s often said, for instance, that wherever you stand in front of the Mona Lisa, her eyes will follow you. Sassoon writes: “In reality the effect can be obtained from any portrait.” Her myth stems, in part, from the story of her theft and return. “A painting had been turned, anthropomorphically, into a person, a celebrity,” says Sassoon. Peruggia, by choosing Mona Lisa that morning, helped elevate her above all other paintings. That – and a good story – is his legacy. Additional research by Pauline Harris.

To comment on this article, please e-mail magazineletters@ft.com Sample the FT’s top stories for a week You select the topic, we deliver the news. Select topic Aug. 21, 1911: Mona Lisa stolen in Paris Aug. 21, 1911: Mona Lisa stolen in Paris Teresa Mathew Pin it Share On this day—Aug. 21, 1911—the Mona Lisa was stolen from the Louvre in Paris . The work of art, by Italian artist Leonardo da Vinci, is believed to have been painted between 1503 and 1506. The painter Louis Béroud first discovered the theft when he walked to the place where the Mona Lisa had been on display and found only four iron pegs instead of the famous painting. After the museum confirmed that the painting had in fact been stolen, it was closed for a week to aid the investigation. Though French artist Guillame Apollinaire was initially suspected (he in turn tried to blame his friend Pablo Picasso), the culprit turned out to be Vincenzo Peruggia, a Louvre employee.

Peruggia had stolen the painting during business hours and walked out with it under his coat after the museum had closed. After two years of hiding it, he was caught when he tried to sell the painting to the Uffizi Gallery in Florence . As an Italian loyalist, Peruggia believed that Leonardo da Vinci’s paintings should return to Italy and be displayed in an Italian museum. He would go on to serve six months of jail time. The Mona Lisa has been on permanent display at the Louvre since 1979. Reblog 21 August 1911: The Mona Lisa is stolen from the Louvre - MoneyWeek Home > 21 August 1911: The Mona Lisa is stolen from the Louvre 21 August 1911: The Mona Lisa is stolen from the Louvre By: Chris Carter 21/08/2014 Men idolised her. Poets and painters paid homage to her beauty and sent love letters to her up-market Paris address. One besotted admirer even stood before her in 1910 and put a gun to his head. His eyes fixed on her enigmatic smile, he pulled the trigger.

In the months that followed, Vincenzo Perrugia knew he had to have her. For an Italian outcast, who felt spurned by his Parisian colleagues, she was the ultimate prize. He “fell in love with her”, he confessed from jail. This femme fatale was the Mona Lisa. Lisa del Giocondo sat for Leonardo da Vinci early in the 16th century, and on the painter’s death, French king Francis I bought the painting for 4,000 gold crowns – around £9m today. Following the French Revolution, ‘La Joconde’ as the painting is also known, moved to the Louvre. On the morning of 21 August 1911, Perrugia slipped out of the closet where he’d spent the night. Still wearing his gallery handyman’s garb, he unhooked the painting and walked out with the Mona Lisa concealed beneath his clothes. The theft sparked a media frenzy. The Mona Lisa’s face was splashed over all the European newspapers and on posters and chocolate boxes too, becoming ingrained in the public consciousness. People even queued up at the gallery to see the empty space on the wall.

Suspicion first fell on a disgruntled poet called Guillaume Apollinaire, and then on his painter friend, the young Pablo Picasso. In fact, Picasso was sitting on some statues, also stolen from the Louvre, which he used for his cubist work, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. The pair eventually got off. Then, for almost two years, the trail went cold. During this time, Perrugia lived in his Paris flat, shacked up with the Mona Lisa spread out over his kitchen table. After several abortive attempts to sell the painting, he finally took it to Alfredo Geri, an art dealer in Florence. Geri and his contacts at the Uffizi authenticated the stolen Mona Lisa and contacted the police. In his defence, Perrugia said he had wanted to return the painting to Italy, believing it to have been plundered by Napoleon. But he failed to fool the jury, and he was sentenced to just over a year in jail, later commuted to seven months. The Mona Lisa did a tour of Italy in 1913 before returning home to Paris. There she resides to this day, beguiling the millions of tourists who flock to see her.

Also on this day Communist hardliners arrested Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev while he was on holiday, hastening the end of the USSR, on this day in 1991. Read more here . THE END OF OIL Understanding how the end of oil will affect your life and money is the single most important thing you’ll do in the next decade. And it will affect you, because it’ll affect everyone. But only a handful of people will be bold enough to see what’s happening and move early to take advantage. That’s exactly what our research report “The End of Oil” is designed to help you do. Xi Jinping's reforms will be good for investors The chaos behind the UK's rail crisis The rise and fall of crowdfunding's biggest hit 39. _______ was stolen from the Louvre in 1911 and remained missing for two years. A. Venus de Milo B. Liberty Leading the People C. Raft of the Medusa D. Mona Lisa You have new items in your feed. Click to view. Question and answer 39. _______ was stolen from the Louvre in 1911 and remained missing for two years. A. Venus de Milo B.

Liberty Leading the People C. Raft of the Medusa D. Mona Lisa Mona Lisa was stolen from the Louvre in 1911 and remained missing for two years. 39. _______ was stolen from the Louvre in 1911 and remained missing for two years. A. Venus de Milo B. Liberty Leading the People C. Raft of the Medusa D. Mona Lisa New answers This answer has been confirmed as correct, not copied, and helpful. Confirmed by Andrew. [3/1/2015 3:21:47 AM] Comments Log in or sign up first. Questions asked by the same visitor Weegy: Massive rotunda is an architectural features that is not typically Gothic. (More) Question Updated 2/22/2015 10:56:40 AM 0 Answers/Comments For several hundred years following the end of the first millennium, many Christians believed that the world was coming to an end. A consequence of that belief are the many artworks from the period that are illustrations of the A. creation of Adam. B. Last Supper. C. day of judgment. D.

expulsion from the Garden of Eden. Weegy: For several hundred years following the end of the first millennium, many Christians believed that the world was coming to an end. A consequence of that belief are the many artworks from the period that are illustrations of the day of judgment. [ ] (More) Question Asked 2/22/2015 10:56:05 AM 0 Answers/Comments

Question: What was stolen from the Louvre in 1911?
Answer: The Mona Lisa