On the morning of Monday 21 August 1911 the Louvre was closed to the public. A man in a white workman's smock came down a staircase carrying something flat under his arm, crossed a courtyard, and walked out into the Paris morning. Nobody stopped him. Nobody had any reason to.
He was Vincenzo Peruggia, an Italian glazier who had worked at the museum — he had helped fit protective glass over some of its paintings, including the one now under his arm. He had spent the night inside, in a storeroom. In the morning he lifted the Mona Lisa off her four iron pegs, carried her into a stairwell, took her out of her frame and her glass, and put the poplar panel under his smock. The empty frame was found on the stairs.
Nobody noticed for a day
The theft was not discovered until the following morning, when a painter named Louis Béroud came to sketch her and found the wall bare. He assumed she had been taken away to be photographed. When it turned out she had not, the Louvre closed for a week and the borders were watched.
The investigation was not a triumph. The poet Guillaume Apollinaire was arrested and held for several days; he named his friend Pablo Picasso, who was questioned and released. Neither had anything to do with it.
Meanwhile the Louvre reopened, and something strange started to happen. People queued to look at the four iron pegs and the pale rectangle where she had hung. More of them came to see the empty space than had ever come to see the painting.
Two years later, a letter signed “Leonardo”
In November 1913 an art dealer in Florence named Alfredo Geri received a letter offering to return the Mona Lisa to Italy. He brought in Giovanni Poggi, the director of the Uffizi. The two men met Peruggia in his hotel room, where he lifted the panel out of a trunk with a false bottom. They authenticated it, told him it would have to be examined properly, and called the police.
Peruggia said he had done it for Italy — that Napoleon had looted her and he was bringing her home. It was a good story and it was wrong: Leonardo carried the painting to France himself, and François I bought it. Peruggia served seven months. The Mona Lisa toured Italy to enormous crowds and was back on her wall in the Louvre by January 1914.
She had hung quietly for four centuries. The two years she was missing made her the most recognised face on earth.
Four centuries on a wall, then a stairwell, a smock and a trunk. The next stop is a kitchen table, with the story on the back of the mug.
Some stories are better over a coffee. Fifteen minutes with someone — audio only, not open yet.