Good morning.

Today, an empty wall in the Louvre… and the thief who turned a fine portrait into the most famous face on earth.

Let’s begin.

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The Day the Mona Lisa Vanished

Leonardo da Vinci—“Mona Lisa”

P	aris. Monday, 21 August 1911. The Louvre is closed, as it is every Monday. At about seven in the morning, a small man in a white smock walks in through the workers’ door. Nobody stops him, because every workman in the building wears the same smock.

His name is Vincenzo Peruggia. He is 29, a house painter and glazier from a village in the Italian Alps. Not long before, he had worked at the Louvre himself… building glass cases for its paintings.

He walks into the Salon Carré, a gallery packed with Italian masterpieces. The room is empty. On the wall, held by four iron pegs, hangs a small portrait on a wooden panel.

Peruggia lifts it down and carries it to a service staircase. There he strips off the glass case and the frame. Then he wraps the painting in his smock, tucks it under his arm, and heads for the exit.

A door at the bottom of the stairs is locked. But a passing plumber takes him for a colleague, and opens it for him.

Nobody notices anything for more than a day. The museum’s director, on holiday that week, had reportedly scoffed at the very idea.

“Steal the Mona Lisa? You might as well pretend that someone could steal the towers of Notre-Dame.”

Théophile Homolle, director of the Louvre, as reported

On Tuesday morning, a painter named Louis Béroud arrives to make a copy. He finds four bare pegs. At first the guards assume the picture has gone to be photographed. Hours later, it still has not come back… and this is the wall Béroud is staring at.

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The empty space where the Mona Lisa hung in the Salon Carré, August 1911

The Mona Lisa’s empty place in the Salon Carré, August 1911. Published in The Century magazine, 1914.

The Louvre shut its doors for a week. About sixty police officers searched the building, and the director soon resigned.

When the museum reopened, crowds queued to stare at the empty wall. One of them was Franz Kafka, the young writer from Prague.

Then the police arrested a poet. Guillaume Apollinaire, a champion of modern art in Paris, had once employed a secretary named Géry Pieret. Years earlier, Pieret had stolen small Iberian stone heads from the Louvre and sold two of them to Apollinaire’s friend Pablo Picasso. Picasso was questioned too, and both men were cleared.

The real thief was much closer to home. Police visited Peruggia’s room twice and believed his answers. One detective reportedly wrote his report leaning on the very table where the painting was hidden.

They even had his photograph on file, taken after an earlier arrest in 1909.

Police photograph of Vincenzo Peruggia, 1909

Vincenzo Peruggia, police photograph, 1909. Public domain.

For more than two years, the Mona Lisa lay in a trunk in his small room on the rue de l’Hôpital-Saint-Louis, in eastern Paris.

In late 1913, Peruggia wrote to Alfredo Geri, an art dealer in Florence, and signed himself “Leonardo.” Geri called in Giovanni Poggi, director of Florence’s Uffizi Gallery. Poggi examined the painting and confirmed it was real. That December, police arrested Peruggia at his hotel.

“I am an Italian and I do not want the picture given back to the Louvre.”

Vincenzo Peruggia, as quoted after his arrest

He said he had done it for Italy. He believed Napoleon had stolen the painting. In fact, Leonardo had carried it to France himself, and it passed to King Francis I.

Italy cheered him anyway. In Florence, a crowd that The New York Times put at 30,000 swept past the police to see the painting. A court gave Peruggia a year and fifteen days… and on appeal he served seven months.

Newspapers on both sides of the Alps could not get enough of him.

The Paris daily Excelsior covers Vincenzo Peruggia and the theft of La Joconde

The Paris daily Excelsior on the thief and the theft of “La Joconde.” Public domain.

In January 1914, she was back on the wall in Paris.

And here is the twist. Before 1911, critics admired the Mona Lisa, but she was not a household name. Two years of headlines changed that. Her face had been printed in newspapers, on postcards, and in cartoons across Europe and America.

In other words, the theft did not steal her fame. It created it.

This is the face all of Paris had been missing. She was Lisa Gherardini, the wife of a Florentine silk merchant, Francesco del Giocondo… which is why the French call her La Joconde.

Leonardo da Vinci, “Mona Lisa,” about 1503–1519. Oil on poplar panel. Musée du Louvre, Paris.

The first time I saw her, I was disappointed. She is barely 77 centimetres tall, behind thick glass, across a sea of raised phones. It took me years to understand why the crowds keep coming. Part of the answer is a thief from the Alps.

If you want the full story, Joe Medeiros spent years tracing Peruggia’s own letters for his documentary, and it is worth your evening: Mona Lisa Is Missing →

Peruggia died in 1925, on his 44th birthday. He never made his fortune.

But he gave the Mona Lisa something Leonardo never could… an empty wall that all of Paris came to stare at.

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Three Things Worth Knowing

I	Literature A Poet in a Cell

Guillaume Apollinaire spent several days in La Santé prison in September 1911, suspected of the theft. He turned the ordeal into a sequence of short poems, “À la Santé,” later collected in Alcools (1913), one of the founding books of modern French poetry. Even false suspicion can become literature.

II	Music The Song That Topped the Charts

In 1950, Nat King Cole recorded “Mona Lisa,” a ballad by the songwriters Jay Livingston and Ray Evans for the film Captain Carey, U.S.A. It reached number one in America and won the Academy Award for Best Original Song. A painting made famous by newspapers became famous all over again on the radio.

III	Le Mot Juste Sfumato

Sfumato comes from the Italian fumo, “smoke.” It names Leonardo’s trick of blending edges so softly that no line is visible, especially at the corners of the mouth and eyes. That is why her smile seems to shift as you look at it. Use the word when a painting’s outlines melt rather than stop.

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Curious & Controversial

◆	Peruggia always said he acted alone. Some accounts claim two Italian brothers, Vincenzo and Michele Lancelotti, helped him, and that the men hid in a storeroom overnight before the theft. Historians still disagree.

◆	In 1932, an American journalist named Karl Decker claimed a con man called Eduardo de Valfierno had planned the whole theft to sell forged copies as the stolen original. The story is famous, but Decker is its only source, and nothing else confirms it.

◆	Peruggia’s patriotic motive is disputed too. Letters he wrote to his father, now kept in Florence’s state archive, talk about the fortune he expected to make.

◆	History repeated itself in October 2025, when thieves took eight pieces of the French crown jewels from the Louvre’s Apollo Gallery in a matter of minutes. In January 2026, after the heist, strikes and overcrowding, the museum raised its prices for most non-European visitors by 45%.

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Connoisseur’s Diary

Worth Seeing This Week

She hangs today in the Salle des États, behind bulletproof glass, in the Denon wing of the Louvre. Go knowing the story, and the crowd around her starts to make sense.

Where: Musée du Louvre, Rue de Rivoli, 75001 Paris. Closed on Tuesdays; open late on Wednesday and Friday evenings. Tickets: €22 for EU and EEA residents; €32 for most other visitors; free for under-18s. Book a timed slot online. Insider tip: Once you have seen her, turn around. Veronese’s The Wedding Feast at Cana, the largest painting in the Louvre, hangs on the facing wall, and most visitors never look at it. Plan your visit at louvre.fr →

Worth Reading

Vanished Smile: The Mysterious Theft of Mona Lisa — R.A. Scotti (2009). A fast, novelistic account of the theft and the two-year hunt, from the empty wall to the hotel room in Florence.

Explore Further

Watch: Mona Lisa Is Missing →, Joe Medeiros’s 2012 documentary about Peruggia.

Listen: The Theft That Made the ‘Mona Lisa’ a Masterpiece →, NPR’s report for the theft’s centenary.

Tonight’s Quiz

1. Who first noticed the Mona Lisa was missing?

A) A museum guard on his rounds

B) A painter who came to copy it

C) The Louvre’s director

D) A tourist from America

Answer: B. The painter Louis Béroud found four bare pegs on Tuesday morning, more than a day after the theft.

2. How was Vincenzo Peruggia finally caught?

A) His thumbprint on the glass case

B) A neighbour spotted the painting

C) He offered it to an art dealer in Florence

D) Picasso identified him

Answer: C. He wrote to the dealer Alfredo Geri, who brought in the Uffizi’s director to examine the painting before calling the police.

3. Which poet was jailed on suspicion of the theft?

A) Arthur Rimbaud

B) Guillaume Apollinaire

C) Paul Verlaine

D) Charles Baudelaire

Answer: B. Apollinaire spent several days in La Santé prison in 1911 and wrote poems about it; the other three were long dead by then.

If the links above don’t respond in your email app, just reply with your answers—I’ll write back.

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A man who wanted to make his fortune from the Mona Lisa ended up making hers instead. Two years of absence did more for her than four centuries on the wall.

Tomorrow, an opera house in Sydney whose architect quit before it was finished… and never came back to see it.

Until tomorrow,
Charles T. Mayfair