115 Years Ago Today the Mona Lisa Vanished From the Louvre. A Week Later, People Lined Up to See the Empty Wall — Woody Magazine, Aug. 21, 2026
Woody Magazine
We write the things that aren't news
Aug. 21, 2026 (Fri.)
115 Years Ago Today the Mona Lisa Vanished From the Louvre. A Week Later, People Lined Up to See the Empty Wall
In Brief
- On Monday, Aug. 21, 1911, with the Louvre closed for the day, a glazier named Vincenzo Peruggia lifted the Mona Lisa off its hooks, tucked it under his smock and walked out. He had been hired to fit protective glass over that very painting. Nobody noticed until the next morning.
- For 28 months the panel sat in a trunk in a Paris boarding house. Meanwhile newspapers printed the face again and again, and when the Louvre reopened, visitors queued to look at four bare hooks on a wall.
- The 1907 Baedeker guide had given the painting two sentences. When it came home in January 1914, more than 100,000 people came to see it in the first two days.
Walk into the Louvre today and the crowd moves in one direction. Roughly eight in ten visitors come for the Mona Lisa, according to Smithsonian magazine. You enter the room and see raised phones before you see the picture, which hangs far back behind glass, about the size of a postage stamp from where you stand. People line up anyway. It is the most famous painting in the world. That is reason enough.
Fair enough. Leonardo da Vinci painted it, it is more than 500 years old, and whole libraries have been written about the smile. It would be natural to assume it was always like this. But the 1907 Baedeker guide to Paris, the standard handbook for a traveler of the day, gave the picture two sentences. The 1878 edition had given it a full paragraph. The entry was shrinking, and the Venus de Milo and the Winged Victory of Samothrace got far more space. In 1907 the Mona Lisa was one Renaissance panel among many in a long gallery.
How did that picture become, within four years, the most famous painting on earth? We usually answer with one word: stolen. That is true. But plenty of paintings get stolen. In 2010 thieves took a Picasso and a Matisse from the Paris Museum of Modern Art in a single night, and almost nobody can name either canvas. What changed the Mona Lisa was less the theft than the 28 months that followed it.
The man who came to fit the glass
On the morning of Monday, Aug. 21, 1911, the Louvre was closed to the public, as it was every Monday. A 29-year-old Italian named Vincenzo Peruggia walked in wearing the white smock that museum workmen wore. He was not sneaking in; he belonged there. He worked for a glazing firm under contract to the Louvre, and until a few months earlier he had been coming into the building regularly to fit protective glass over its most valuable paintings. The museum had ordered the glass after a run of knife attacks on pictures and a threatening letter aimed at the Mona Lisa. One of the hands that installed that protection was Peruggia's.
He walked to the Salon Carré and lifted the painting off the wall. It is oil on a poplar panel, 77 by 53 centimeters, and weighs only a few kilograms. In a service stairwell he pried off the glass and the frame, slid the panel under his smock, and walked out of the Louvre into the morning. Nobody stopped him. A man in a white smock crossing a corridor on a Monday was one of the most ordinary sights in the building.
The museum did not know until the next day. On Tuesday morning a painter named Louis Béroud arrived with his easel to sketch the Salon Carré and found four iron hooks where the picture should have been. He asked a guard, who told him the painting had probably gone down to the photography studio. The Louvre often took pictures off the wall to photograph them and did not always tell anyone. Only hours later, when the studio reported it had no such painting, did the police arrive. By then the Mona Lisa had been gone for more than a day.
That is worth pausing over. A place where a painting can be missing for a day and nobody notices: that was the Louvre in 1911. According to Smithsonian magazine, it was the largest building in the world, with more than 1,000 rooms, and fewer than 150 guards watched over a quarter of a million objects. A year before the theft, a heavy statue of the goddess Isis had disappeared outright. Peruggia was not especially daring. The building was simply easy to walk out of with a painting under your coat.
The posters go up
The Louvre closed for a week. Sixty detectives searched the building and compared a thumbprint left on the glass against the records of 257 employees. And during that week the Mona Lisa moved to the front page. Not only in Paris. Papers across Europe and America ran the same face. The magazine L'Illustration offered 40,000 francs to whoever brought the picture in, and the Friends of the Louvre added 25,000 of their own. Wanted posters for the painting appeared on Paris walls.
When a person goes missing, posters go up around the neighborhood. Neighbors who walked past that person every day stop and study the face for the first time. They learn the name, the eyes, the set of the mouth, and they start saying they might have seen her somewhere. That is what happened to the Mona Lisa in the fall of 1911. More people looked at that face in the few weeks after it disappeared than in the four centuries since it was painted. Not the original, of course. The face on the newsprint.
When the Louvre reopened, there was a line. The people in it had not come to see a painting; they had come to see where a painting used to be. They stood in front of a blank wall with four hooks in it. Among them was a young insurance clerk from Prague. Franz Kafka went with his friend Max Brod to look at the empty space, and that evening they went to a vaudeville show that made fun of the theft. Postcards followed, then a cabaret song, then a short film. For a season, the absence of one picture was the entertainment of Paris.
The police arrest the wrong men
The investigation was loud and led nowhere. Detectives jailed the poet Guillaume Apollinaire for several days and brought in the painter Pablo Picasso for questioning. The link was thin: Apollinaire's former secretary had once stolen a pair of Iberian stone heads from the Louvre and sold them to Picasso. Neither man had anything to do with the Mona Lisa. The actual painting was in a boarding house in the 10th arrondissement, under the false bottom of a wooden trunk.
It is not that the police never met Peruggia. While they worked through everyone who had set foot in the Louvre, an inspector, by one account, climbed the stairs to his room. The room was so shabby that the inspector decided no one living like this could have pulled off such a thing, and he left without searching it. The painting was inside. Peruggia told police he had learned of the theft from the newspapers, and that he had been late to work that Monday because he had been drinking the night before. They believed him.
So 28 months passed. In December 1913, Peruggia took a train to Florence with the trunk. He had written to an antiques dealer, Alfredo Geri, signing himself "Leonardo." The letter made an offer. Leonardo's painting was a humiliation to Italy as long as it hung in France, and he would bring it home for 500,000 lire. Geri called in Giovanni Poggi, the director of the Uffizi. In a hotel room the two men saw the panel laid out on the bed. They carried it to the Uffizi, checked the marks on the back and the pattern of cracks against the Louvre's photographs, and went to the police. Peruggia was arrested at the hotel on Dec. 11.
At trial he pleaded patriotism. Napoleon had looted the painting, he said, and he had only brought it back. But Napoleon had nothing to do with it. Leonardo himself carried the panel to France in 1516, and King Francis I paid for it. Peruggia was sentenced to a little over a year and was out before the year was up; some Italian papers wrote about him as a folk hero. The painting toured Florence, Rome and Milan, then returned to the Louvre on Jan. 4, 1914.
The painting comes home; the posters stay up
More than 100,000 people in two days. For a painting the guidebook had covered in two sentences seven years earlier. That number does not tell us the painting got better. It had spent 28 months in a trunk, and not a brushstroke had changed. What changed was the people coming to see it. They already knew the face. They had looked at it for two years in newspapers, on postcards, on reward posters, and now they were coming to check it against the real thing. When the missing person comes home, the posters come down. The face people memorized from them stays.
Here an objection is fair. If the painting was not famous, why did the Louvre bother putting glass over it? A reasonable point. But the glass the Louvre installed in 1910 went over several of its most important pictures, not the Mona Lisa alone, and the reason was knives and threats, not crowds. People in those years went to the Louvre to see masterpieces. They did not go to see the Mona Lisa. A handful of critics had been calling it the supreme Renaissance portrait since the 1860s, but that judgment had not yet made it past two sentences in a guidebook.
One more story needs clearing away, because it is retold constantly. An Argentine con man called Valfierno, the story goes, hired Peruggia to steal the painting so that he could sell six forgeries to wealthy buyers, each buyer believing he had the stolen original. It is a wonderful tale with exactly one source, a 1932 article in the Saturday Evening Post by an American reporter named Karl Decker. No document since has confirmed that Valfierno existed. Smithsonian magazine notes that there is no historical evidence to support it. And yet the story gets repeated more often than the facts of 1911. An empty space fills with stories. That, too, is the whole point of this painting.
Back at the empty wall
So let us put the sequence in order. The Louvre hired a glazing firm to protect its paintings. A man from that firm walked out with one. The building was so large that nobody noticed for more than a day. Newspapers sent the face around the world. People lined up to look at a wall with nothing on it, and while the painting was gone, they learned the face. When it came back, they did not come to see a picture for the first time. They came to confirm one they already knew. Nowhere in that sequence is Leonardo's brush.
If we ask what we actually mean by famous, the answer is rarely what is in front of us. It is what we keep coming back to. A picture that hangs on the wall every day gets walked past. A picture that is missing gets looked for every morning. When Andrew Lloyd Webber chose the subject of his next musical this spring, it was not Leonardo's studio but the theft of 1911. When thieves took the crown jewels from the Louvre last October, the story every newspaper reached for was this one. A hundred and fifteen years on, the thing people most often tell about this painting is the two years it was not there.
Leonardo painted it. Peruggia took it. What made it famous was the 28 months in between. People did not memorize that face standing in front of it. They memorized it while it was gone.
Sources
- Source ↗ Smithsonian Magazine, "Stolen: How the Mona Lisa Became the World's Most Famous Painting" (2011)
- Source ↗ Smithsonian Magazine, on Andrew Lloyd Webber's Mona Lisa musical (April 2026)
- Source ↗ Library of Congress, Chronicling America research guide: "Theft of Mona Lisa"
- Source ↗ History.com, "Theft of Mona Lisa is discovered"
- Source ↗ RTBF, "Le jour où La Joconde disparut" (October 2025, in French)
- Source ↗ National Geographic, on the Louvre's history of thefts (October 2025)
- Source ↗ The Hollywood Reporter, on Lloyd Webber shelving The Illusionist (July 2026)
- Source ↗ ARTnews archive coverage, 1911 and 1913
댓글
댓글 쓰기