On August 21 1911, the Mona Lisa vanished under mysterious circumstances from the Louvre in Paris. Vincenzo Peruggia, an Italian artist who had been working at the gallery took the painting from the Salon Carré where it hung to a nearby service staircase, where he removed the protective case and frame.

It is believed that Vincenzo left the Louvre, concealing the painting under his coat.

There is another version that Vincenzo did not act alone but had spent the night in an art-supply closet with two other men. And on that Sunday morning 21 August 1911, with the Louvre still closed, they slipped out of the closet and lifted 200 pounds of painting, frame and protective glass case off the wall. Stripped  its frame and case, covered it with a blanket and hustled off to the Quai d’Orsay station, where the trio boarded a 7:47 am express train out of the city.

The day the Mona Lisa was returned to the Louvre two years later.

Mona Lisa

The Mona Lisa is a half-length portrait painting by Italian artist Leonardo da Vinci. Considered an archetypal masterpiece of the Italian Renaissance, it has been described as “the best known, the most visited, the most written about, the most sung about, the most parodied work of art in the world.

People flocked to the Louvre to view the empty space where the painting had once hung, the museum’s director of paintings resigned, and the poet Guillaume Apollinaire and artist Pablo Picasso were even arrested as suspects.

Two years later an art dealer in Florence alerted local authorities that a man had tried to sell him the painting. Police found the portrait stashed in the false bottom of a trunk belonging to Vincenzo Peruggia, an Italian immigrant who had briefly worked at the Louvre fitting glass on a selection of paintings, including the Mona Lisa. He and possibly two other workers had hidden in a closet overnight, taken the portrait from the wall the morning of August 21, 1911, and run off without suspicion.

Peruggia was arrested, tried, and imprisoned, while the Mona Lisa took a tour of Italy before making its triumphant return to France.

Famous, Overnight

Before its theft in 1911, the “Mona Lisa” was not widely known outside the art world. Leonardo da Vinci painted it in 1507, but it wasn’t until the 1860s that critics began to hail it as a masterwork of Renaissance painting. And that judgment didn’t filter outside a thin slice of French intelligentsia.

The day the Mona Lisa was returned to the Louvre two years later in 1914.

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