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 Mona Lisa Stolen from Louvre Museum The Mona Lisa by Leonardo da Vinci is kept in Louvre. It is owned by the French government and is the most valuable painting in the world. It was bought by French King Francis I in 1519. In France, the Mona Lisa is called La Joconde. Mona Lisa - X-ray technology has shown there are 3 different versions of the Mona Lisa under the visible one.

Leonardo da Vinci began painting the Mona Lisa in 1503, during the Italian Renaissance and, according to Vasari, "after he had lingered over it four years, left it unfinished...."He is thought to have continued to work on it for three years after he moved to France and to have finished it shortly before he died in 1519.Leonardo took the painting from Italy to France in 1516 when King François I invited the painter to work at the Clos Lucé near the king's castle in Amboise. Most likely through the heirs of Leonardo's assistant Salai, the king bought the painting for 4,000 écus and kept it at Château Fontainebleau, where it remained until given to Louis XIV. Louis XIV moved the painting to the Palace of Versailles. After the French Revolution, it was moved to the Louvre. Napoleon I had it moved to his bedroom in the Tuileries Palace; later it was returned to the Louvre. During the Franco-Prussian War (1870–1871) it was moved from the Louvre to a hiding place elsewhere in France.

Mona Lisa is named for Lisa del Giocondo, a member of the Gherardini family of Florence and Tuscany and the wife of wealthy Florentine silk merchant Francesco del Giocondo. The painting was commissioned for their new home and to celebrate the birth of their second son, Andrea. At his death in 1525, Leonardo's assistant Salai owned the portrait named in his personal papers la Gioconda which had been bequeathed to him by the artist. Theft and vandalism The Mona Lisa painting now hangs in the Musée du Louvre in Paris, France. The painting's increasing fame was further emphasized when it was stolen on August 21, 1911. The next day, Louis Béroud, a painter, walked into the Louvre and went to the Salon Carré where the Mona Lisa had been on display for five years. However, where the Mona Lisa should have stood, he found four iron pegs. Béroud contacted the section head of the guards, who thought the painting was being photographed for marketing purposes. A few hours later, Béroud checked back with the section head of the museum, and it was confirmed that the Mona Lisa was not with the photographers.

The Louvre was closed for an entire week to aid in investigation of the theft. French poet Guillaume Apollinaire, who had once called for the Louvre to be "burnt down," came under suspicion; he was arrested and put in jail. Apollinaire tried to implicate his friend Pablo Picasso, who was also brought in for questioning, but both were later exonerated. At the time, the painting was believed to be lost forever, and it would be two years before the real thief was discovered. Louvre employee Vincenzo Peruggia stole it by entering the building during regular hours, hiding in a broom closet and walking out with it hidden under his coat after the museum had closed.[ Peruggia was an Italian patriot who believed Leonardo's painting should be returned to Italy for display in an Italian museum. Peruggia may have also been motivated by a friend who sold copies of the painting, which would skyrocket in value after the theft of the original.

After having kept the painting in his apartment for two years, Peruggia grew impatient and was finally caught when he attempted to sell it to the directors of the Uffizi Gallery in Florence; it was exhibited all over Italy and returned to the Louvre in 1913. Peruggia was hailed for his patriotism in Italy and only served a few months in jail for the crime.[ During World War II, the painting was again removed from the Louvre and taken safely, first to Château d'Amboise, then to the Loc-Dieu Abbey and finally to the Ingres Museum in Montauban. In 1956, the lower part of the painting was severely damaged when a vandal doused the painting with acid. On December 30 of that same year, a young Bolivian named Ugo Ungaza Villegas damaged the painting by throwing a rock at it. This resulted in the loss of a speck of pigment near the left elbow, which was later painted over. The use of bulletproof glass has shielded the Mona Lisa from more recent attacks.

In April 1974, a handicapped woman, upset by the museum's policy for the disabled, sprayed red paint at the painting while it was on display at the Tokyo National Museum. On August 2, 2009, a Russian woman, distraught over being denied French citizenship, threw a terra cotta mug or teacup, purchased at the museum, at the painting in the Louvre, cracking the glass enclosure. In both cases, the painting was undamaged. Copyright © 2010-3010 ToParisToday.com · All Rights Reserved Contact Us on: mail@ToParisToday.com Mona Lisa stolen from the Louvre museum Conservation The Mona Lisa has survived for more than 500 years, and an international commission convened in 1952 noted that "the picture is in a remarkable state of preservation."[ This is partly due to the result of a variety of conservation treatments the painting has undergone.

A detailed analysis in 1933 by Madame de Gironde revealed that earlier restorers had "acted with a great deal of restraint." Nevertheless, applications of varnish made to the painting had darkened even by the end of the 16th century, and an aggressive 1809 cleaning and re-varnish removed some of the uppermost portion of the paint layer, resulting in a washed-out appearance to the face of the figure. Despite the treatments, the Mona Lisa has been well-cared for throughout its history, and the 2004-05 conservation team was optimistic about the future of the work. Speculation about the painting Although the sitter has traditionally been identified as Lisa del Giocondo, a lack of definitive evidence has long fueled alternative theories, including the possibility that Leonardo used his own likeness. Other aspects of the painting that have been subject to speculation are the original size of the painting, whether it is the original, why it was painted, and various explanations for how the effect of an enigmatic smile was achieved. 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 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 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. Did the Nazis also steal the Mona Lisa? - CNN.com Did the Nazis also steal the Mona Lisa? Noah Charney, art historian, Special to CNN Updated 7:44 AM ET, Tue June 30, 2015 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 December 14 marks the 100th anniversary of when Mona Lisa was returned after being stolen It was snatched by an Italian handyman who worked inside the Louvre He had mistakenly thought that Napoleon had looted it and wanted to repatriate it Confusion remains where Mona Lisa was kept during WWII Noah Charney is a professor who teaches the history of art crime.

He is the bestselling author of The Thefts of the Mona Lisa: On Stealing the World's Most Famous Painting , all profits from which support art crime research. (CNN) When the likes of George Clooney, Matt Damon, and Bill Murray come storming across film screens this winter, in the drama The Monuments Men , viewers will be immersed in the world of Nazi art theft. The Monuments Men were a group of some three-hundred Allied officers charged with locating, protecting, and recovering art and monuments that were endangered by the fighting in World War II. They would eventually learn of Hitler's elaborate and highly-organized plan to strip Europe of its art. Indeed, Hitler had established a military unit solely dedicated to art and archive theft and made detailed plans to restructure the entirety of his boyhood town of Linz, Austria, into a city-wide "super museum," containing every important artwork in the world. We have the so-called Monuments Men to thank for the salvation of tens of thousands of masterpieces, among the estimated five million cultural objects stolen during the war.

But while the film will focus on two great trophies, Jan van Eyck's Adoration of the Mystic Lamb , and Michelangelo's Bruges Madonna, there will be something of an elephant in the screening room. For a fascinating question remains, and one with a complicated answer: did the Nazis steal the Mona Lisa? The answer is that they thought they did. Mona Lisa's vanishing act Read More The most famous act of theft associated with the Mona Lisa took place about a century ago. December 14, 2013 marks the 100th anniversary of the return of the world's most famous painting to public display, after it was stolen in 1911 from the world's most famous museum. Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa was swiped from the under-secured Louvre Museum by an amateur Italian painter and handyman named Vincenzo Peruggia. Peruggia was under the mistaken impression that the painting had been looted by Napoleon, during his Italian campaign. This was a pretty good guess, for through his art theft unit (the first military unit in history dedicated to art theft), Napoleon had made off with tens of thousands of artworks during his Italian campaign.

Leonardo's painting was not among them, however, as it had left Italy with the elderly Leonardo, when he spent his twilight years under the protection of the French king, Francois I, who legally purchased several of his paintings after his death, the Mona Lisa among them. Read more: Christie's: Evolution of the Asian art market But Peruggia had missed the lecture on this historical detail. He saw an opportunity to repatriate the painting when the firm for which he worked as a carpenter and glazier was hired to build protective cases to cover some of the Louvre's most famous works, ostensibly to protect them from attack, after an anarchist had slashed an Ingres painting in protest. Peruggia found himself with a Louvre worker's uniform, and direct contact with the Mona Lisa. On the night before August 2 1911, he hid inside a closet in the Louvre, waiting for the footfalls of the night guards to fade into the distance. In the early morning hours, he slipped out of the closet, removed the Mona Lisa from its wall in the Salon Carre of the Louvre, and retreated to a service staircase.

There he took the painting out of its frame, wrapped it in a white sheet, and headed down the stairs. There was surely a moment of great panic, when Peruggia twisted the doorknob at the foot of the stairs, and found it locked from the inside. He was prepared for an eventuality such as this, and had tools with him. He unscrewed the doorknob and slipped it into his pocket, thinking this might unlock the door, but it didn't. He was trapped inside the Louvre, with the world's most famous painting tucked under his arm...and then he heard the sound of footsteps approaching. Up the stairs came a plumber, making his morning rounds. To the plumber, Peruggia looked like a Louvre worker who had accidentally been locked in overnight—not an unheard-of occurrence. He opened the door and let Peruggia out, thinking nothing of the Mona Lisa-shaped package that Peruggia carried with him. It would be two years before the Mona Lisa was seen again. The investigation was a fiasco that resulted in the dismissal of the head of the Louvre and the head of the Paris police.

International media mocked the lack of security at the Louvre -- in fact, this was the first theft to spark the interest of the world media, kicking off a love affair with the elite world of high-priced art, and its theft. Read more: Rare Psalm book sells for $14.2 million Priceless loot The most cinematic and resounding success for the Monuments Men was the salvation of the 12,000 masterpieces destined for Hitler's planned Linz museum, which were stored in an ancient salt mine at Altaussee, in Austria, which had been converted by the Nazis into a secret stolen art warehouse. Peruggia was under the mistaken impression that the Mona Lisa had been looted by Napoleon, during his Italian campaign. Noah Charney It was supervised by a ferocious SS officer, August Eigruber, who was determined to destroy all of the art if he could not defend it against the Allies. This is where the most famous pieces were kept, including gems by Vermeer, Raphael, Rembrandt, and a who's-who of Old Master artists. But there is some confusion as to whether the Mona Lisa was there, as well.

There are two primary source documents that attest to the Mona Lisa's presence in the Altaussee salt mine. The report of a secret mission called Operation Ebensburg, in which four Austrian double-agents were parachuted into the alps to delay the destruction of the Altaussee mine until the Allied Third Army could arrive, stated that the double agents "saved such priceless objects as the Louvre's Mona Lisa." Another document from 12 December 1945 notes that "the Mona Lisa from Paris [is included in] 80 wagons of art and cultural objects from across Europe" that were found in the mine. And yet there is no record beyond these two documents of the world's most famous painting being part of the world's most famous hoard of looted art. Surely that would have been noteworthy, a rescued prize as famous as Adoration of the Mystic Lamb. Shrouded in mystery The Louvre remained reticent about whether it had lost the Mona Lisa at all.

The only documents about the painting during World War II attest to its having been crated up on August 27, 1939, and sent with other French national treasures to a series of five chateaux, for safe-keeping—theoretically just ahead of the advance of the Nazis south through France, though the invaders quickly overtook the entire country. The next document that refers to the painting is not until 16 June 1945, when the painting was listed as having been returned safely to the Louvre. Its whereabouts during the war are unrecorded. But are they unknown? The latest word from the Louvre is that an identical copy of the Mona Lisa, also from the 16th century and difficult for any non-specialist to distinguish from the original, was one of a few thousand works that were gathered at the Musee Nationaux de la Recuperation, for whom owners could not be found. This copy was marked MNR 265. After five years had passed with no one able to prove ownership, it went to the Louvre. From 1950 onward, it hung on the wall outside the office of the director of the museum.

Based on the available evidence, and a little detective work, a plausible (though unconfirmed) conclusion may be reached as to what happened to the Mona Lisa during the war. A painting was crated up in 1939 and sent to various castles, just ahead of Nazi hands—but it was this 16th century copy, not the original. Knowing that the Mona Lisa would be such an obvious target for Nazi art hunters, the Louvre may have kept the original hidden in Paris, while the copy led the Nazis on a wild goose chase. This would explain why the "Mona Lisa" did return from Altaussee, but why it may also be that the "Mona Lisa" never left Paris. It was the copy that was stolen, hidden at Altaussee, and recovered. Some who saw it assumed it was the original, while others, specifically the art-savvy Monuments Men who catalogued the art saved from the salt mine, recognized that it was only a copy. To see Dr Charney giving a TEDx talk about the 1911 Mona Lisa theft, click here .

Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa - Crime Museum Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa Home » Crime Library » Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa is arguably the most famous paintings in history. Therefore, it is not surprising that the Mona Lisa has been a target for crime. On August 21, 1911, Mona Lisa was stolen from the Louvre Museum in Paris. However, it was not until the next afternoon that anyone realized the famous painting had been stolen. Museum officials believed that the Mona Lisa had been temporarily removed for photography for marketing purposes. After the painting was reported stolen, the Louvre shut down for a week, and over 200 officials from the French National Criminal Investigation Department arrived. They searched every room, closet, and corner of the infamously massive 49-acre museum. When they failed to recover the painting, investigators began a grueling hunt for the Mona Lisa. They questioned countless people before determining that the painting was likely lost forever. The Mona Lisa was missing for two years before it was recovered close to where it was originally painted, in Florence, Italy.

Vincenzo Peruggia, an employee of the museum stole the painting, hid it in a broom closet, and waited to leave until the museum was closed for the day. The painting was small enough to be hidden under his coat. For two years, Peruggia hid the Mona Lisa in his apartment, and was eventually caught when he tried to sell it to Florence’s Uffizi Gallery. Peruggia was an Italian nationalist, and believed that the Mona Lisa belonged to Italy. After an Italian tour, the painting was returned to its current home in the Louvre in 1913. Peruggia was convicted and served a six-month sentence for the theft, though in Italy, he was hailed as a national hero.

Merchandise: Mona Lisa's Miles: The Misadventures Of Leonardo's Masterpiece On the Road | The Huffington Post Mona Lisa's Miles: The Misadventures Of Leonardo's Masterpiece On the Road 07/05/2011 05:58 am ET | Updated Sep 03, 2011 ARTINFO The online authority for art news and gallery reviews Italian historian Silvano Vincenti, known for his scheme to dig up the bones of Lisa Gherardini , the presumed model for the Mona Lisa, is trying to bring the iconic painting to Florence in 2013. While no official request has yet been made -- Vincenti is hoping to get 100,000 people to sign his petition and to marshal the support of the Italian parliament -- the Louvre has already refused, with painting department director Vincent Pomarède telling AFP that the Mona Lisa is "extremely fragile and travel risks causing irreversible damage." Leonardo da Vinci's "Mona Lisa" While its potential trip to Florence has been nixed, the Mona Lisa has traveled in the past, and ARTINFO France has compiled a list of its journeys -- both authorized and unauthorized.

1911 - 1913 The Mona Lisa -- which Leonardo da Vinci began painting in Florence in 1503 and took with him to France, where it entered the collection of French king François I -- made an illicit trip to its hometown four centuries later. In 1911, the painting was stolen from the Louvre by Vincenzo Peruggia, a museum employee who kept the masterpiece under his bed for two years before taking it to Florence and trying to sell it. Silvano Vincenti's current request for a loan of the Mona Lisa in 2013 is intended to commemorate the centennial of the painting's recovery in 1913. One of the stranger episodes in French cultural history, the theft of the painting caused a huge scandal, especially since no one at the museum noticed that it was missing until an artist planning on sketching the portrait found a blank space on the wall. Initially, the poet Guillaume Apollinaire was accused of the crime and arrested. After questioning him, French police also held Pablo Picasso, who was a friend of Apollinaire's, but ended up releasing both men after a few days.

When caught two years later, Peruggia said that he wanted to return the painting to its country of origin, and got off with a very light sentence in an Italian court. 1938 - 1945 With the possibility of war with Germany looming in 1938, French officials hid the Mona Lisa for three days before returning it to the Louvre when the Munich Agreement seemed to lessen the danger. When France declared war in 1939, museum officials packed up the painting in a double-walled crate and moved it to various secure underground locations in the Château de Chambord, the Château d'Amboise, the abbey of Loc-Dieu, and the Ingres Museum in Montauban. The painting then migrated to a spot under the Louvre conservator's bed before hiding out in the Château de Montal in southern France. Finally, after the war's end, la Joconde returned to the Louvre in June 1945. 1963 In January, French culture minister André Malraux accompanied the Mona Lisa to the United States. The loan was made directly to then-president John F.

Kennedy and a special viewing was held at the National Gallery for the president and his cabinet, the Supreme Court, the Congress, and the diplomatic corps. At the National Gallery, the painting was guarded around the clock by U.S. Marines and over 500,000 people came to see it over 27 days. The Mona Lisa was then shown at the Met, where it attracted 1.2 million visitors. Just two years ago, former Met director Thomas Hoving revealed in his memoirs that a faulty sprinkler system sprayed water onto the painting when it was locked up in a secure storeroom in the museum at night. No damage was done thanks to the protective glass. 1974 The last time it was on loan, the Mona Lisa headed to the Tokyo National Museum and to Moscow's Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts. Over 1.5 million people saw the painting in Tokyo, which is still a record for exhibition attendance at a Japanese museum. The triplex glass box that now houses the Mona Lisa was a thank-you gift from the Japanese. Click below for a video of Mona Lisa's arrival in the U.S. and its reception by President Kennedy:

Question: Which painting was stolen from the Louvre in Paris in 1911 and kept for two years by museum employee Vincenzo Peruggia?
Answer: Mona Lisa