Should you happen to go to the Louvre to take a look at Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa, you’ll discover that you may’t get especially near it. That owes partially to the ever-present crowd of cellcellphone photographers, and extra so to the painting’s having been put in behind a woodenen barrier and encased in a sturdy-looking glass field. These are go well withready precautions, you would possibly imagine, for the single most well-known murals on the planet. However there wasn’t all the time a lot security, and certainly, nor was Mona Lisa all the time so priceyly prized. A little greater than a century in the past, you could possibly simply stroll out of the Louvre with it.
You could possibly accomplish that, that’s, professionalvided you had a knowlfringe of the Louvre’s internal operations, the nerve to pluck a masterpiece off its partitions, and the needingness to spend an evening in one of many museum’s closets. Vincenzo Peruggia, an Italian immigrant who’d labored there as a clearer and reframer of paintings, had all these qualities. On the night of Solarday, August twentieth, 1911, Peruggia entered the Louvre put oning one in all its standard-issue make use ofee coats. The following day, he emerged into an virtually empty museum, closed because it was to the public each Monday. You could find out what happened subsequent by watching the Primal Area video above, which visualizes every step of the heist and its aftermath.
Why did Peruggia dare to steal the Mona Lisa in broad daymild, an act worthy of Arsène Lupin (himself created only a few years earlier)? Discovered a couple years later, having hidden the painting within the false bottom of a trunk close toly all of the whereas, Peruggia solid himself as an Italian patriot trying to return a chunk of cultural patrimony to its houseland. Another possibility, elaborated upon within the video, is that he was nothing greater than a pawn in a larger scheme masterthoughtsed by the forger Eduardo de Valfierno, who deliberate to make several copies of the missing masterpiece and promote them to credulous American millionaires.
That, in any case, is what one Saturday Night Submit story reported in 1932, although it may effectively be that, in actuality, Peruggia acted alone, out of no excessiveer motive than a necessity for money. (In a approach, it will have been a extra interesting story had the culprits actually been Pablo Picasso and Guillaume Apollinaire, whose unrelated possession of statues stolen from the Louvre drew police suspicion.) However the heist occurred, it willn’t have happened if its object hadn’t already been extensively recognized, at the least amongst artwork enthusiasts. However quickly after La Gioconda was returned to her properful place, she grew to become the face of artwork itself — and the reason museums do issues a lot differently now than they did within the 9teen-tens. The Louvre, you’ll discover, is now closed on Tuesdays as an alternative.
Related content:
What Makes Leonardo’s Mona Lisa a Nice Painting?: An Explanation in 15 Minutes
What Makes the Mona Lisa a Nice Painting: A Deep Dive
Why Leonardo da Vinci’s Niceest Painting is Not the Mona Lisa
How France Hid the Mona Lisa & Other Louvre Masteritems During World Warfare II
When Pablo Picasso and Guillaume Apollinaire Had been Accused of Stealing the Mona Lisa (1911)
Primarily based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His tasks embody the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the ebook The Statemuch less Metropolis: a Stroll by means of Twenty first-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social webwork formerly often known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
