The Thefts of the Mona Lisa: On Stealing the Worlds Most Famous Painting

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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: The answer is that they thought they did. Mona Lisa's vanishing act. The most famous act of theft associated with the Mona Lisa took place about a century ago.

December 14, marks the th anniversary of the return of the world's most famous painting to public display, after it was stolen in from the world's most famous museum. 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. 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 , 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 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.

The most cinematic and resounding success for the Monuments Men was the salvation of the 12, 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.

Did the Nazis steal the Mona Lisa?

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. They slipped out of the gallery, down a back stairwell and through a side entrance and into the streets of Paris.

It would be 26 hours before someone noticed that the painting was missing. At the time the Louvre was the largest building in the world, with more than 1, rooms spread over 45 acres.

Security was weak; fewer than guards protected the quarter-of-a-million objects. Statues disappeared, paintings got damaged. Leonardo painted the portrait around , and it was not until the s that art critics claimed the Mona Lisa was one of the finest examples of Renaissance painting. This judgment, however, had not yet filtered beyond a thin slice of the intelligentsia, and interest in it was relatively minimal. In his guidebook to Paris, travel writer Karl Baedeker offered a paragraph of description about the portrait; in he had a mere two sentences, much less than the other gems in the museum, such as Nike of Samothrace and Venus de Milo.

A letter mailed to the Louvre in from Vienna had threatened the Mona Lisa so museum officials hired the glazier firm Cobier to put a dozen of its more prized paintings under glass. The work took three months; one of the Cobier men assigned to the project was Vincenzo Perugia. The son of a bricklayer, Perugia grew up in Dumenza, a Lombardy village north of Milan. In at the age of 25, Vincenzo left home, trying out Paris, Milan and then Lyon. After a year, he settled in Paris with his two brothers in the Italian enclave in the 10th Arrondissement. Perugia was short, just 5 feet 3, and quick to challenge any insult, to himself or his nation.

Twice the Parisian police arrested Perugia. In June he spent a night in jail for attempting to rob a prostitute. Eight months later, he clocked in a week in the Macon, the notorious Parisian prison and paid a franc fine for carrying a gun during a fistfight. He even quarreled with his future co-conspirators; he once stopped speaking to Vincenzo Lancelotti over a disputed 1-franc loan. Perugia wanted to be more than a construction worker.

The Thefts of the Mona Lisa - Noah Charney

He had taught himself how to read and sometimes holed himself up in coffeehouses or museums, poring through books and newspapers. Perugia had enough connections to criminal circles that he hoped to barter or sell it. Would the Louvre cover it up, pretend it had not happened? Finally, late on Tuesday, there was a media explosion when the Louvre issued a statement announcing the theft.

Newspapers around the world came out with banner headlines. Wanted posters for the painting appeared on Parisian walls. Crowds massed at police headquarters. Satirical postcards, a short film and cabaret songs followed—popular culture seized upon the theft and turned high art into mass art.

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Perugia realized that he had not pinched an old Italian painting from a decaying royal palace. He had unluckily stolen what had become, in a few short days, the world's most famous painting. When the Parisian police interrogated him in November as a part of their interviews of all Louvre employees, he blithely said he only learned of the theft from the newspapers and that the reason he was late to work that Monday in August—as his employer had told the police—was that he had drunk too much the night before and overslept. The police bought the story. Supremely inept, they ignored Perugia and instead arrested the artist Pablo Picasso and the poet and critic Guillaume Apollinaire.

They were friends with a thief who admitted to pinching little sculptures from the Louvre.

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