Picture Taking

Question: What famous painting was stolen from a museum—and stayed missing for more than 24 hours before anyone noticed?

Answer: The Mona Lisa

On the morning of August 21, 1911, an employee of the Louvre in Paris and two accomplices disguised themselves as museum janitors and stole Leonardo da Vinci’s most famous painting, The Mona Lisa. That it would take more than two years to recover is no surprise, but how could it possibly take 28 hours before anyone even noticed the world’s most famous painting was missing?

Before we get to that, does this story already have a familiar ring to it? It may be because an equally brazen theft took place at the Louvre on October 19, 2025, when a group of thieves disguised themselves as construction workers and made off with the French crown jewels.

The more recent Louvre heist certainly caused a scandal around lax security at the world-renowned museum, but nothing compared to the scandal that took Paris by storm in 1911, when thieves managed to abscond with the museum’s most treasured possession. So how did they pull off one of the greatest art heists of all time? It was surprisingly easy ...

Night at the Museum

The mastermind was an Italian handyman and museum employee named Vicenzo Peruggia. He had been hired by the Louvre to install protective glass cases for its most valuable paintings—including the Mona Lisa. After hiding in a supply closet until closing time, he simply removed the painting’s glass casing (the one he had installed), tucked the painting in a blanket, and started to leave the building—but found the door was locked. He removed the doorknob, but it still wouldn’t open. Luckily, a blissfully clueless plumber spotted him and used his key to let Peruggia and the girl with the enigmatic smile waltz out of the Louvre and onto the first train out of Paris.

That the theft occurred at all was hardly a surprise. The Louvre already had a reputation for its lackluster security measures. Other galleries bolted their painting to the wall, while most of the artwork in the Louvre—in spite of recent upgrades—was left unsecured and unsupervised. Peruggia wasn’t the first person to take advantage of the museum’s lax security, either. Shortly after his handiwork, a different man confessed to a Paris newspaper that he had been pilfering small artworks and artifacts from the museum for years and making money by selling them to local artists and art lovers. But how do you sell the world’s most famous painting?

As Peruggia knew full well, it would be hard to sell any high-profile painting, and impossible to sell one considered a masterpiece. But here’s the irony—at the time of the theft, the Mona Lisa had a very low profile. It was hardly considered Leonardo da Vinci’s best work, never mind the greatest painting of all time. The reason visitors and staff didn’t even notice its absence for 28 hours is they just assumed it had probably just been taken away by maintenance for cleaning or something—no big deal.

“Fake news” raises Mona Lisa’s profile

But the French press got hold of the crime and everything changed. With newspapers coming into their own at the turn of the century, the French press seized on the opportunity to sensationalize the story while poking fun at the inept government that ran the Louvre. Pretty soon news about the theft—and Mona Lisa’s image—were splashed in newspapers around the world. While there was hardly much  interest in the painting before, now lines formed at the Louvre just to see the empty spot where it had hung. The New York Times reported: “60 detectives seek stolen Mona Lisa. French public indignant.”

It was so good for business, French newspapers kept ramping things up. Fabricating increasing outrage about the heist, they teased audiences by dangling several high-profile suspects—accusing everyone from American banker J. P. Morgan to Germany’s Kaiser Wilhelm II for orchestrating the brazen theft. Pablo Picasso was outright accused of having something to do with the robbery—and while he was completely innocent, he had been the recipient of looted artwork from earlier Louvre thefts. Worried about being deported from France, the Spanish painter considered availing himself of two small statues of questionable provenance by dropping them in the Seine but found that he was too fond of them to let them go.

All the publicity meant that Peruggia was out of luck as far as profiting from his theft, but Mona Lisa suddenly became the most famous painting in the world. Many art scholars claim that if a different one of Leonardo’s works had been stolen, then that would have been the most famous artwork in the world–not the Mona Lisa. Others say that there was nothing that really distinguished the Mona Lisa from other paintings, that it was a very good work by a very famous artist—until it was stolen.

And how did he get caught?

It shouldn’t come as a surprise that all of Mona Lisa’s newfound notoriety led to her eventual return. By the time Peruggia made it to Italy with his relatively forgettable Mona Lisa, the publicity made her far too hot to handle. He waited two years before he dared to contact an art dealer in Florence. While there had been no alarms at the time of the theft in the Louvre, they certainly went off when word spread of the missing Da Vinci’s possible recovery.

After arranging a meeting with the dealer and the director of the Uffizi gallery in Florence, Perrugia turned up with the painting he had kept hidden in a suitcase in his apartment for the past two years. He was promptly arrested, sentenced to eight months in prison, and the Mona Lisa was returned to her home in Paris, where devoted crowds eagerly awaited her arrival. There she sits to this day smiling knowingly at her millions of adoring fans from behind thick bullet-proof glass. And armed guards. Two of them.

Some fascinating facts you may not know about the Louvre

• There’s more than one of them—There’s an annex of the Louvre in the northern French town of Lens, built to reduce the crowds in Paris. There’s another one in Abu Dhabi. That one doesn’t have a pyramid, though ...
• But they charge you an arm and a leg—Of the Louvre’s two most famous statues, one is headless and the other is armless. Excavators weren’t able to find the head of Victoire de Samothrace, a marble sculpture of a winged Greek goddess from the second century B.C. The other ancient Greek sculpture inspired by a goddess sans arms is of course, Venus de Milo.
• That guy rocks—You may have heard that I. M. Pei designed the famous 70-foot glass Louvre pyramid, but did you know that he also designed the Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland? Like the Eiffel Tower, Parisians weren’t initially too wild about the pyramid he designed in 1989 but now accept it as a true emblem of the city. Pei lived to be 102 and now resides in Rock ‘n’ Roll heaven ...
• But it still has that “new museum” smell—Before its opening as a museum, the Louvre had been a grand fortress built in 1190 to stave off invasions from the north. When it became a royal palace in the 16th century, portions of the medieval stronghold were updated with Italian Renaissance architectural elements.
• When people be heading to the Louvre—During the heady days of the French Revolution, while the guillotine was seeing action in the Place de la Concorde, France’s revolutionary government chose to mark this defining moment in French history by opening the doors of the Louvre on August 10, 1793. Calling the former royal palace the Muséum Central des Arts was a political statement that France’s treasures now belonged to the people.
• Why does this sound familiar?—During his reign, Napoleon Bonaparte renamed the Louvre after himself—Musée Napoleon. An art lover, he even hung the Mona Lisa in his bedroom at the Palais Tuileries (which later was converted into part of the Louvre). His army helped fill the museum with artistic spoils of war from all over Europe. After his fall in 1814, more than 5,000 pieces of pilfered art were returned to their rightful owners—though not all of them.
• Quelle surprise!—Of the close to 7,500 paintings hanging in the Louvre, more than 66% of them are from French artists. A source of great pride for the French, some of its most famous paintings include The Raft of the Medusa, Liberty Leading the People, and The Coronation of Napoleon.
• Did my invitation get lost in the mail?—The largest painting in the Louvre’s collection is The Wedding Feast at Cana, by Paolo Veronese. Measuring 22 feet high and 33 feet wide, it was stolen by French troops in 1797, cut in half, rolled up, and shipped to Paris, where conservators meticulously stitched the oil-on-canvas masterpiece back together.
• Quick, hide the silverware—The Nazis were known for a lot of things—including stealing and destroying artwork. In the days leading up to the occupation of Paris, more than 4,000 works of art from the Louvre were transported to the Loire Valley and hidden in a château to ride out the war. It was a brilliant move, since the Nazis had already set ablaze close to 4,000 pieces of art they deemed of “little value” in 1939. The Nazis commandeered the Louvre for the entirety of the occupation until they were ousted from Paris by Allied troops.

Visit the Louvre and see the enigmatic Mona Lisa smile during French Impressions: From the Loire Valley to Lyon & Paris.