It was a quiet, humid Monday morning in Paris, 21 August 1911. Three men were hurrying out of the Louvre. It was odd, since the museum was closed to visitors on Mondays, and odder still with what one of them had under his jacket. They were Vincenzo Perugia and the brothers Lancelotti, Vincenzo and Michele, young Italian handymen. They had come to the Louvre on Sunday afternoon and secreted themselves overnight in a narrow storeroom near the Salon Carré, a gallery stuffed with Renaissance paintings. In the morning, wearing white workmen’s smocks, they had gone into the Salon Carré. They seized a small painting off the wall. Quickly, they ripped off its glass shadow box and frame and Perugia hid it under his clothes. They slipped out of the gallery, down a back stairwell and through a side entrance and into the streets of Paris. They had stolen the Mona Lisa.
It would be 26 hours before someone noticed The Mona Lisa was missing. It was understandable. At the time the Louvre was the largest building in the world, with more than 1,000 rooms spread over 45 acres. Security was weak; fewer than 150 guards protected the quarter-of-a-million objects. Statues disappeared, paintings got damaged. (A heavy statue of the Egyptian god Isis was stolen about a year before the Mona Lisa and in 1907, a woman was sentenced to six months in prison for slashing Jean Auguste Ingres' Pius VII in the Sistine Chapel.) At the time of the “Mona Lisa” heist, Leonardo da Vinci's masterpiece was far from the most visited item in the museum. Leonardo painted the portrait around 1507, and it was not until the 1860s that art critics claimed the Mona Lisa was one of the finest examples of Renaissance painting. Continue reading from The Smithsonian Magazine
Art's Great Whodunit: The Mona Lisa Theft of 1911 (Time Magazine)
How the 1911 Theft of the Mona Lisa Made it the World’s Most Famous Painting (The Washington Post)
Mona Lisa Painting by Leonardo da Vinci (Britannica)
The Theft That Made The 'Mona Lisa' A Masterpiece (NPR)
Theft of Mona Lisa: Topics in Chronicling America (Library of Congress)
Theft of the Mona Lisa from the Louvre (PBS)
