The Janitor Who Stole The Mona Lisa And Hid It Under His Bed

When Leonardo da Vinci, the Florentine painter of the Italian Renaissance, relocated to France, the portrait went with him. He was under the patronage of King Francis I, who purchased it for himself a few years later. The Mona Lisa is painted in oil on a poplar panel and was the property of the French crown well before it came to reside in the Louvre.

Decades before the theft, the Mona Lisa had been on display in the Louvre’s Salon Carré, one of the museum’s most famous galleries, surrounded by many other well-known paintings. Art historians and symbolist poets alike paused before it to take in the sight, and scholars considered Leonardo’s work to be among the most beautiful in the Louvre’s collection. What it did not have, however, was popular fame, as everyday tourists unfamiliar with reproductions of the image had no way of recognizing the face on display. But the theft would change that.

The director of France’s national museums, Théophile Homolle, told the press that stealing the Mona Lisa would be as impossible as stealing the towers of Notre-Dame Cathedral. The actual security at the Louvre, however, was a bit different. Around 200 guards patrolled more than 400 exhibition rooms. Maintenance days routinely left the doors unlocked, and the many contractors who worked there did so largely without supervision. Homolle’s confidence was about to be tested.

Vincenzo Peruggia was a 30-year-old Italian glazier in Paris who worked for the company the Louvre hired around 1909 to make glass mounts for some of its greatest paintings. He actually made and installed the case that surrounded the Mona Lisa, which meant he knew exactly how the painting was fitted into it, how big it was, and how the Louvre was laid out. Peruggia was not a criminal. He was a craftsman who already knew the Mona Lisa inside-out.

By 7 AM on Monday, August 21, 1911, the Louvre was shut for routine maintenance. The Mona Lisa sat untouched in the Salon Carré. Vincenzo Peruggia, the glazier whose job it was to install the glass case surrounding the portrait, slipped in through a back entrance. He wore the requisite white smock issued to all workmen, and was easily mistaken for one of the cleaners. Peruggia made his way directly to the Salon Carré and removed the Mona Lisa from her four iron wall pegs.

Peruggia lifted the painting off its wall and took it through an unprotected service stairway, toward a rear courtyard. Using the same glazier’s tools he had used when installing the case, he unscrewed the back mounting to separate the naked wooden panel from the glass, left the glass behind, and wrapped the panel in his smock.

Peruggia had already removed the exit door’s knob with a screwdriver, and now the door was stuck, with the painting underneath his smock. A Louvre plumber named Jules Sauvet discovered him and, thinking he was just another tradesman locked in by a defective latch, turned the bare spindle of the door with a pair of pliers and let him out. Peruggia thanked the plumber, left the museum, and stepped into the Parisian streets.

The Louvre’s employees frequently took works to the museum’s own photography lab without recording the move, so there was no alert that day for the Mona Lisa’s absence. A painter named Louis Béroud, who spent a good amount of time working in the Salon Carré, noticed four blank pegs when he arrived to work the following morning and notified the guard on shift, who thought the painting was at the photography lab. The guards did not report its disappearance until approximately noon, 28 hours after Peruggia had made his escape.

The theft was confirmed on August 22, 1911. The French government closed the Louvre for a week and deployed 100 police detectives throughout the building. Borders were on alert. Police searched departing steamships. Théophile Homolle, director of the museum, who’d proclaimed that no one could steal the Mona Lisa, was forced to resign in shame.

The head of the identification bureau of the Paris police, Alphonse Bertillon, lifted a very clear left thumbprint from the glass case that Peruggia had left behind in the stairwell. He should have been able to find Peruggia’s identity, since his prints were already on file from a petty arrest two years before. But Bertillon’s files were arranged for right-hand prints. The evidence that could have brought him in at once was sitting there, useless, in his cabinet.

The French poet Guillaume Apollinaire’s secretary, Géry Piéret, had stolen several ancient stone statuettes from the Louvre in years past and sold two of them to the painter Pablo Picasso in 1907. Piéret anonymously bragged about it to a newspaper in 1911. Police rounded up Apollinaire on September 7, 1911, and brought Picasso into court. Neither man had any part in the disappearance of the Mona Lisa, but both were cleared within days.

After the Louvre reopened on August 29, 1911, newspapers in France and the U.S. began running daily front-page news about the theft, republishing the image of the painting once more. Crowds of thousands waited in line outside the Salon Carré just to gaze upon the bare wall and four empty pegs. People left flowers and handwritten messages there. On both sides of the Atlantic Ocean, cabaret songs, postcards, and ads turned the theft into an ongoing gag.

But with no plausible suspect in sight, anti-German newspapers in France suggested that Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany had ordered his intelligence services to steal the painting as a way of shaming France. Others speculated that the American millionaire banker J. P. Morgan had ordered the heist to add the work to his private art collection. No proof existed to support either theory. Both stories merely reflected the nationalism rising to a crescendo in Europe before the outbreak of World War I.

Peruggia and the Mona Lisa lived and worked together for two years. Between August 1911 and November 1913, the most-hunted painting in the world was concealed within the false bottom of a trunk and stashed beneath his bed or next to his stove in a spartan Parisian boardinghouse, just a few miles from where he had stolen it. Police questioned Louvre contract workers, including Peruggia, during that stretch, but accepted his alibi and never opened the trunk.

When Peruggia went to Florence in November of 1913, he sent a letter to a well-known art dealer there named Alfredo Geri, using the pseudonym “Leonardo Vincenzo” to say that he had the Mona Lisa and wanted to return it to Italy. For his efforts, he would receive 500,000 lire. While the letter contained some patriotic rhetoric, it also contained some straightforward demands for money and provided investigators with what they needed to crack the case after two years of nothing.

Days later, on December 11, 1913, dealer Alfredo Geri and Giovanni Poggi, the director of Florence’s Uffizi Gallery, met Peruggia in a room at the Hotel Tripoli-Italia. There Peruggia opened the false bottom of his trunk and extracted the panel wrapped in red velvet. Poggi turned it over, and there on the back were the Louvre’s own catalog numbers and the stamps of the frame. The painting was genuine.

Geri and Poggi talked Peruggia into allowing them to store the panel at the Uffizi Gallery, then discreetly contacted the Italian military police, who arrested him in his hotel room without any resistance. To keep relations smooth with France, Italian authorities sent the painting on a celebratory tour through Florence, Rome, and Milan before it headed back across the border.

The Louvre received the Mona Lisa under heavy police guard, and it was once more displayed in the Salon Carré on January 4, 1914, 28 months after it had disappeared. The painting’s appearance excited massive popular and press interest. The two-year run of news headlines on the theft ended that day, when the world finally saw the face it had been looking for.

Peruggia’s defense at his trial in Florence in June 1914 was that he was a simple, uneducated patriot, not a shrewd, mercenary one, and, thanks to Italy’s anti-French sentiment, he became a genuine popular hero. On June 5, 1914, he was sentenced to slightly more than a year in prison, but the sentence was cut on appeal to seven months. By then, he had already spent the required time in custody waiting for trial, so he was released almost immediately. He joined the Italian army in World War I and died in France in 1925.

In 1932, American journalist Karl Decker published a magazine story inventing a fictional character, Marquis Eduardo de Valfierno, an aristocratic member of Argentina’s upper class. The story claimed Valfierno orchestrated the theft and sold six forged versions to wealthy American collectors while Peruggia stole the real painting. But historians, including Joe Medeiros, have proven that the Valfierno character, the forger, and his six fake paintings were all made-up creations for an extra paycheck. The whole myth was built around what turned out to be the banality of the theft: a glazier simply walked out the door.

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