The Empty Wall That Created the World’s Most Famous Painting

The image that would become the most famous painting in the world first truly became visible on the morning when no one could see it. On Tuesday, August 22, 1911, the French painter Louis Béroud arrived at the Louvre to work on a copy of the Mona Lisa. On the wall of the Salon Carré, he found four iron pegs and an empty rectangle. At first, the guards were not alarmed. They assumed the painting had been taken to the museum photographer, as artworks were routinely moved around for such purposes. Only when it turned out not to be there either did they realize that someone had removed it from the wall the previous morning and carried it out of the Louvre.

In the days that followed, people came to look at the place where the painting was no longer hanging. The empty wall became an attraction in its own right, almost a monument to French humiliation. To report that the Mona Lisa was missing, newspapers had to keep showing readers what it looked like. Then came everything from postcards and caricatures to cabaret songs and short films. The theft, one might say, gave the painting something artworks usually lack - a plot. Its disappearance gave it a biography, and mass media gave that biography an audience.

It would be wrong, however, to say that the Mona Lisa had been "unknown" before the theft. Leonardo da Vinci, the celebrated Italian Renaissance artist and one of the central figures of European cultural history, painted the portrait in the early 16th century. The sitter is traditionally identified as Lisa Gherardini, wife of the Florentine silk merchant Francesco del Giocondo. His surname gave the painting its Italian name, La Gioconda, and its French one, La Joconde. King Francis I of France acquired the work after Leonardo moved to France. By the 19th century, writers such as the French critic Théophile Gautier and the British essayist Walter Pater had already built an almost mystical cult around her gaze.

But there is a difference between a masterpiece and a celebrity. In 1911, the Mona Lisa belonged to the artistic canon, but she did not yet belong to everyone. The popular Baedeker guide to Paris devoted less space to her than to the Winged Victory of Samothrace and the Venus de Milo. Art historians, educated travelers and regular museumgoers knew her. The theft moved her out of that circle and onto the front pages. It did not create her artistic value, but it did create her modern fame.

The man who carried out the theft was no international criminal mastermind. Vincenzo Peruggia was a Lombard immigrant, a house painter and glazier who had worked for a company contracted by the Louvre. He had helped install protective glass over valuable paintings and knew how the museum operated. According to his later account, he arrived early on Monday, August 21, wearing the white work smock used by museum employees. The Louvre was closed to the public that day. Peruggia lifted the portrait off its four pegs, carried it to a service staircase and removed its frame and protective glass.

One of the most famous art thefts in history required no tunnels, explosives or team of acrobats. All it took was work clothes and an institution in which a white smock was more persuasive than an identity check. It is worth noting that the Mona Lisa is not painted on canvas but on a poplar panel, about 77 centimeters high and 53 centimeters wide. It is often said that Peruggia hid it beneath his clothes. According to his own account, he took off his smock, wrapped the panel in it and simply carried it away under his arm. There is something almost comical about the fact that the Louvre protected the painting with glass but failed to protect the door from the man who knew how to remove that glass.

France responded to the humiliation with an enormous investigation. Around sixty police investigators worked on the case, the Louvre remained closed for days, and the magazine L’Illustration offered 50,000 francs for the painting's return. The museum director resigned. With little else to go on, police attention eventually turned to the French poet Guillaume Apollinaire, who spent several days in jail, and even to the Spanish painter Pablo Picasso. The connection was not entirely imaginary - a man from Apollinaire's circle really had stolen small antiquities from the Louvre, and some of them had ended up in Picasso's possession. But neither man had anything to do with the Mona Lisa.

While police watched the borders and interrogated avant-garde artists, the painting was sitting in Peruggia's modest Paris room. Remarkably, police even questioned him as a former Louvre worker, but accepted his answers and never conducted a serious search of the premises. The Mona Lisa remained there with him for 28 months. Meanwhile, thousands of people visited the empty spot in the Louvre. Among them were the Prague writer Franz Kafka and his friend Max Brod, who later went to see a stage show that was already making fun of the theft. High art had entered the rhythm of mass culture - crime, headline, parody, another headline.

France's greatest policeman versus a man in a work smock

If anyone in 1911 was supposed to find the Mona Lisa quickly, it was Louis Lépine, the legendary prefect of the Paris police. Newspapers sometimes went so far as to call him "the greatest policeman in the world." He was the man who modernized the Paris police, encouraged the development of forensic methods and reorganized the way public order was maintained throughout the city. His name survives today in the Concours Lépine, the inventors' competition he founded in 1901. Once it became clear that the Mona Lisa had been stolen, Lépine sent around 60 inspectors to the Louvre. The museum was closed, exits were blocked, rooms were searched and employees questioned.

Everything, in other words, looked like an investigation worthy of France's most formidable police authority. The problem was that his opponent was embarrassingly ordinary. Vincenzo Peruggia was neither a professional thief nor a member of an international criminal gang, but a former Louvre worker who knew the building and understood that a white work smock would make him look as though he belonged there. The very banality of the theft made the investigation harder. The public imagined wealthy foreign collectors and sophisticated criminal networks.

The best part of the story came when the investigation finally reached Peruggia himself. Because he had worked on installing protective glass at the Louvre, police did in fact question him in 1911. An inspector visited his small Paris room and accepted his claim that he had been working elsewhere at the time of the theft. The Mona Lisa was in that very room. According to later accounts, it was hidden so close to the investigator that the entire episode eventually acquired the quality of a crime farce.

In December 1913, Peruggia, signing himself "Leonardo V.", contacted the Florentine art dealer Alfredo Geri. He claimed that he wanted to return the painting to Italy, but at the same time asked for a very tangible reward - 500,000 lire. Geri summoned Giovanni Poggi, director of the Uffizi Gallery, who confirmed that the painting was genuine. But the two experts had no intention of allowing Peruggia's plan to unfold quite as he imagined it. They took possession of the painting for safekeeping and informed the police. Peruggia was arrested at his hotel.

His defense was romantic enough to outlive the facts. He said he wanted to undo Napoleon's plunder of Italy and return Leonardo's painting to its homeland. The problem was that the Mona Lisa had never been Napoleonic war booty. As already noted, Leonardo himself brought it to France, and Francis I acquired it almost three centuries before Napoleon's campaigns. Peruggia later spoke about the insults he had endured as an Italian worker in Paris, so his nationalism may not have been entirely invented. Still, the letters, negotiations and demand for 500,000 lire suggest that patriotism was not his only motivation.

Even so, parts of the Italian public embraced Peruggia as a clumsy national hero. The Mona Lisa was exhibited in Florence, Rome and Milan, under police guard and before enormous crowds.

Peruggia received a lenient sentence and spent only a few months in prison. The painting returned to the Louvre in early January 1914. More than 100,000 people came to see it during the first two days after it was rehung. The theft was over, but its promotional effect was only beginning.

From then on, the Mona Lisa became both more and less than a painting. More, because she became a universal symbol of art itself. Less, because her image could now be endlessly reproduced, sold and mocked. In 1919, the French artist Marcel Duchamp drew a moustache and goatee on a cheap reproduction and called the work L.H.O.O.Q. The joke worked only because the audience instantly knew what had been desecrated. True cultural fame begins when the name no longer even needs to be mentioned.

Today's visitor therefore does not approach the Mona Lisa without expectations. They come to see whether the real painting - surprisingly small to many - matches the enormous image they already carry in their minds. They look at the soft, almost smoky transitions of Leonardo's sfumato, but they are also looking at the theft, the headlines, Duchamp's moustache and the millions of photographs taken by people before them to prove that they, too, had stood there. Fame itself has become part of the material.

Peruggia may have wanted to return the Mona Lisa to Italy. Instead, he returned her to mass culture. His theft failed as an act of repatriation but succeeded as one of the most effective publicity campaigns in history. It did not change the smile in the painting. It changed the number of people who were convinced they already knew it.