The Mona Lisa taken from the Louvre, 1911

On Tuesday 22 August 1911, the painter Louis Béroud went to the Louvre in Paris to copy the Mona Lisa. He found the painting gone. The guards first thought it had been sent to the museum’s photographers. It had not. It had been taken the day before, Monday 21 August, when the Louvre was closed to the public. Le Temps announced the loss at 5 pm on the Tuesday, and the museum stayed shut until 29 August. The New York Times reported that the empty frame was found on a staircase.

The painting is a portrait in oil on a poplar panel, 79.4 by 53.4 centimetres. The Louvre says Leonardo da Vinci began it about 1503, probably for Francesco del Giocondo, a Florentine silk merchant. The sitter was his wife, Lisa Gherardini. Leonardo kept the panel until he died. The museum says it was very probably bought by Francis I of France in 1518.

The inquiry first turned to other people. Théophile Homolle, director of the national museums, was removed from office in September 1911, and ARTnews reported that the guards were found negligent. On 7 September the police arrested the poet Guillaume Apollinaire and held him until 12 September. The arrest was over Louvre statuettes taken by his former secretary, not over the painting. The painter Pablo Picasso was questioned. Both men were cleared. In November, Smithsonian Magazine reports, police interviewed Vincenzo Peruggia with the other Louvre staff and let him go.

Peruggia was an Italian decorator, born in 1881, who worked in Paris from 1908 and did work at the Louvre between 1909 and 1911. In his interrogation in Florence he said he entered alone at about 7 am by the workers’ door and took the panel from the Salon Carré. He said he left the frame and glass case on a service stair and went out by the Porte Jean Goujon, after a worker with a key opened a locked door for him. The Louvre and Smithsonian Magazine instead say he and two helpers hid in a store room on the Sunday. The Florence prosecutor said accomplices could not be ruled out. Nobody else was tried.

On 24 November 1913 Peruggia wrote to Alfredo Geri, a Florence art dealer, signing himself “Leonard V.” He was answering an advertisement that Geri had placed. He reached Florence on 10 December. On 11 December he showed the panel to Geri and to Giovanni Poggi, director of the Uffizi gallery, who took it to the Uffizi to study it. Peruggia was arrested on Friday 12 December. Geri and Poggi were witnesses and were not accused. The painting was shown in Italian cities and returned to its place in the Louvre on 4 January 1914. Smithsonian Magazine says more than 100,000 people saw it in its first two days back.

Peruggia said he wanted to bring the painting home to Italy. The Florence courts rejected a purely patriotic motive and found a motive of profit, citing his letters to his father and an attempt to sell the panel in London. The French government made a formal request so that an Italian court could try a crime committed abroad. In early June 1914 the Florence tribunal convicted Peruggia of aggravated theft and sentenced him to one year and 15 days. An appeal court in late July 1914 cut the term to seven months and eight days, counted as already served in custody. The painting hangs today in the Louvre, in Room 711 of the Denon wing.