The art heist that made the Mona Lisa arguably the most famous painting in the world

By Lucia Stein, Marc Fennell and Taryn Priadko for No One Saw It Coming, ABC

Early on the morning of 21 August, 1911, a brazen thief dressed as a museum employee entered the Louvre in Paris without raising an alarm.

The building was only open to staff when the Italian man entered the famous Salon Carré, scanned the wall of priceless artworks and walked up to a portrait of a smiling woman.

After checking the coast was clear, he took the painting off the wall and lugged it into a nearby stairwell, where he extracted the piece from its heavy frame.

The artwork was Leonardo Da Vinci's Mona Lisa.

With the portrait hidden under his white smock, the thief then walked out of the building, escaping into the crowd at the Rue de Rivoli.

As with all famous art heists, conflicting accounts of how the man managed to pull the crime off have emerged over the years, from suggestions he hid in a storage closet before the theft to rumours he was aided by accomplices.

What is undeniable is that it took nearly 24 hours for someone to notice the Mona Lisa was gone.

It's believed artist Louis Béroud first reported the missing artwork to security after arriving at the gallery the next morning to find the place the portrait once occupied on the wall was bare.

The theft shocked both the public and the art world, fuelling a desperate search for suspects that, at one time, included the famous artist Pablo Picasso.

But the man who stole it turned out to be an unknown tradesman named Vincenzo Peruggia.

While his true motivations remain unproven, Peruggia's theft had one unforeseen consequence: It turned the Mona Lisa into a household name.

"It was considered to be a masterpiece, but it was also considered to be one masterpiece in an entire museum full of masterpieces.

"So it definitely didn't have the same level of celebrity status that it does today," art history communicator Mary McGillivray tells ABC Radio National's No One Saw It Coming.

Once famously described by Walter Pater as "older than the rocks among which she sits", the portrait's disappearance catapulted its status beyond the art world and into the public consciousness as both a prized artwork and a source of intrigue.

The plot to steal the Mona Lisa

The Mona Lisa, also known as La Gioconda, is an oil painting of a Renaissance woman painted by Da Vinci in 16th century Florence, Italy.

The work is hailed as an artistic masterpiece for its display of innovative techniques and the depicted woman's enigmatic expression.

Yet her identity has been debated for centuries.

The depiction has traditionally been associated with Renaissance noblewoman Lisa Gherardini (or del Giocondo), the wife of Florentine silk merchant Francesco del Giocondo.

It's believed Gherardini's husband commissioned the portrait but it was never presented to him.

Instead Da Vinci took the unfinished piece with him when he moved to France to work at the court of King Francis I in 1516.

When the painter died three years later, the Mona Lisa was passed onto Da Vinci's apprentice and then sold to the French King before it eventually wound up at the Louvre.

The portrait was put on public display alongside other works and later encased in a protective glass case to deter vandals.

It is here where a possible connection between the artwork and Peruggia can be drawn; he had once worked at the museum as a glazier and may have been one of the men who helped fabricate the portrait's casing.

"He had inside knowledge, shall we say, of how the Louvre's framing and security would work," McGillivray says.

But there was more to his theft than opportunity. Peruggia's motive might have been rooted in nationalist pride and a desire to see the painting back on Italian soil, McGillivray says.

Fuelled by this belief or other intentions, Peruggia pulled off the art heist of the century when he walked out of the Louvre and fled to his Parisian home.

No-one suspected the masterpiece would be lying inside a sparsely furnished, one-room apartment on the rue Hopital Saint-Louis.

"Soon, it would be fitted snugly into the false bottom of a trunk which had been specially built to match the panel's dimensions," wrote Darian Leader, author of Stealing the Mona Lisa: What art stops us from seeing.

There it would remain hidden for two years, as a police search stretched far and wide for the stolen artwork.

A case of mistaken Picasso

In the hours after the alarm was raised about the missing portrait, McGillivray says there was "enormous panic" at the Louvre.

Security staff initially assumed the Mona Lisa had been temporarily removed to be photographed for inventory, but that view changed as inquiries into the portrait's whereabouts hit dead ends.

Dozens of detectives and police officers arrived to scour the museum from cellar to attic for signs of the portrait. By 5pm, the theft was announced to the public, making front page news.

According to one New York Times report at the time, the robbery caused such a sensation that Parisians briefly forgot "the rumours of war".

And when the Louvre reopened a week later, crowds of people flocked to the bare patch of wall where the Mona Lisa once hung.

"People were laying flowers at the base … like it was a loss for the city of Paris," McGillivray says.

Thousands of copies of the smiling woman were circulated by French police on the streets of the city, while newspapers around the world included the portrait in stories of the theft.

The Mona Lisa was suddenly everywhere, seen by people who might never have had the chance to view the portrait in real life.

Meanwhile, police officers interviewed "every single employee that they [could] find from the museum," McGillivray says.

One of them was a contractor who turned out to be a witness to the crime. He claimed he helped Peruggia unlock a door to exit the building on the day of the robbery, having assumed he was an employee.

In the absence of other solid leads, a swirl of theories filled the void, from claims it was an "inside job" to allegations the missing artwork was an act of cultural sabotage.

Artist Pablo Picasso was one of the most high-profile figures suspected of the crime.

He and his friend avant garde poet Guillaume Apollinaire likely raised suspicions because they both had reputations as "men about town who might pull a prank", McGillivray says.

"There was a little hobby that some of these men in the artistic circles of Paris had at the time to steal minor objects or collection items from the Louvre to have for themselves."

The "irony" is that in Picasso's case, the police were right to be wary, according to McGillivray.

At the time, the painter had two Iberian sculptures taken from the Louvre museum in his possession.

"So Picasso was guilty of housing stolen Louvre artworks, just not La Giaconda," she says.

How was the Mona Lisa recovered?

After the initial buzz wore off and with no fresh leads in the case, it seemed as if the Mona Lisa was lost forever.

Peruggia had managed to stay under the radar, undetected by authorities for two years.

He reportedly kept the Mona Lisa away from human eyes during the time he held the portrait, allowing no-one, not even himself, a glimpse of her face.

But by 1913, the Italian national was ready to move back home with his loot.

Using a pseudonym, he put out feelers to Alfredo Geri, a Florentine antiques dealer, about a stolen work of Leonardo Da Vinci that McGillivray says "immediately raised alarm in the Italian art community".

Peruggia then stowed the painting in a trunk, boarded a train from Paris to Florence and met with the art dealer.

During that December meeting, the thief reportedly told Geri the Mona Lisa was at his lodgings. Shortly afterwards, Peruggia was captured and arrested.

He pleaded guilty to theft and served just seven months in prison. After his release, he returned to Paris, where he died in 1925.

From masterpiece to household name

Questions about Peruggia's motive in stealing the Mona Lisa linger to this day.

Was he a proud Italian national hoping to bring a stolen treasure home? A desperate man looking to make money? Or an opportunist?

"Vincenzo decided to basically return [the Mona Lisa] to the state of Italy … because he is essentially expecting to get a reward for bringing it home," McGillivray says.

"He thinks that this patriotic act of stealing this famous painting and bringing it back to Italy will bring him sort of fame and thanks from the Italian people."

This sentiment feels particularly poignant since it echoes modern debates about the repatriation of artworks taken during colonisation.

"The question of who should own great masterpieces of Italian art is really contentious still today to the Italians because so many of these Renaissance masterpieces are not in Italy - they're in Paris and they're also in London," McGillivray says.

"So there is a sense of great cultural loss that Italians sometimes still feel about the artworks and the cultural history that they feel they are missing."

The Mona Lisa was put back on public display in the Louvre on 4 January, 1914.

"I think what this theft does to the painting's reputation is elevate it to essentially becoming the most reproduced painting in the world and perhaps even the most reproduced artwork ever in human history," McGillivray says.

"The image in black and white of a profile of a woman with a vague, barely discernible landscape in the background was sent everywhere on all continents [when it went missing].

"So in its absence from the wall of the Louvre Museum, it kind of became everywhere."

- ABC