The Mona Lisa Comes Home
On December 12, 1913, the world's most famous missing painting was recovered in a Florence hotel room — two years after a handyman stole it from the Louvre.
For more than two years, the most famous painting on Earth sat in a trunk with a false bottom in a Paris apartment. On December 12, 1913, it was found in a Florence hotel room.
The theft had been almost absurdly simple. On Monday, August 21, 1911 — the Louvre's closed day — Vincenzo Peruggia, a 30-year-old Italian handyman who had once worked at the museum, lifted the Mona Lisa off the wall. The painting measured less than 31 by 21 inches; he hid it under his coat and walked out the back door. Police questioned everyone, including a young Pablo Picasso, but the trail went cold. And then something unexpected happened: the theft made the painting a global celebrity. Crowds queued at the Louvre just to stare at the empty space on the wall, and newspapers printed her face around the world. With the whole planet watching, Peruggia could never sell it. So it sat in his trunk, waiting.
By late 1913, Peruggia was broke and restless. Writing as "Leonardo," he contacted Alfredo Geri, an art dealer in Florence, claiming he wanted to "return" the painting to Italy — for 500,000 lire in "expenses." Geri had no intention of buying stolen art. He alerted Giovanni Poggi, the director of the Uffizi Gallery, and the police.
On December 10, Peruggia checked into Florence's Hotel Tripoli. On December 12, 1913, Geri and Poggi visited his room and examined the painting. The Louvre's inventory number was there — and so was the painting's unmistakable pattern of craquelure, half a million tiny cracks in the varnish. There was no doubt: this was Leonardo's. The two men left the painting "for safekeeping," and police arrested Peruggia in his room that same day. The Mona Lisa was recovered.
At his trial in June 1914, Peruggia was sentenced to a year and 15 days; he served seven months after appeal. His defense was patriotism — he sincerely believed Napoleon had looted the painting from Italy. He was wrong: Leonardo had brought it to France himself in 1516, and King Francis I had acquired it legally. Italy adored him anyway.
It matters because the heist invented the modern art crime — and made the Mona Lisa the most famous painting in the world. Returned to the Louvre in January 1914, her fame today owes as much to a handyman's trunk as to Leonardo's brush.
Photo: Benh Lieu Song, CC BY-SA 4.0 (via Wikimedia Commons).
