The Mona Lisa Got Famous by Going Missing

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In late August 1911, thousands of people filed into a gallery at the Louvre in Paris to stare at a wall. There was almost nothing on it: four iron hooks, and the space where a painting had hung.

The painting was the Mona Lisa. Days earlier, someone had walked out of the museum with it. And the crowds who came to look at where it used to be were a sign of something new. The painting was becoming far more famous gone than it had ever been on the wall.

Before 1911

That might sound backwards. Surely the Mona Lisa was always the world's most famous painting?

Not quite. Leonardo da Vinci painted it in the early 1500s, and experts had long admired it. From the 1860s, critics began to praise it as one of the finest paintings of the Renaissance. But that admiration hadn't spread much beyond a fairly small circle of art lovers.

One telling detail: a popular 1907 guidebook to Paris gave the Mona Lisa just two sentences, far less space than star attractions such as the Venus de Milo. It was respected, valuable and well known to connoisseurs. It wasn't yet a household name.

A very simple heist

The theft itself was almost embarrassingly easy.

On Monday 21 August 1911, the Louvre was closed to visitors, as it was every Monday. Vincenzo Peruggia, an Italian handyman who had worked at the museum, and two accomplices had hidden inside overnight. In the morning, wearing the white smocks of workmen, they lifted the painting off the wall of the Salon Carré, stripped off its frame and protective glass, and carried it out under Peruggia's clothes.

The Louvre was enormous and its security thin. More than a day passed before anyone realised the painting wasn't simply somewhere else in the building.

Missing makes a story

Once the museum announced the theft, the news exploded. Newspapers around the world ran banner headlines, often with a picture of the painting, so millions of people who had never seen it now met that face over breakfast.

Paris went a little mad for it. There were wanted posters, satirical postcards, cabaret songs and even a short film. When the Louvre reopened about a week later, crowds came to look at the empty wall.

The police were under huge pressure, and not at their best. Among those they arrested or questioned were the poet Guillaume Apollinaire and the painter Pablo Picasso, who knew a man who had admitted stealing small sculptures from the Louvre. Both were released, and neither had anything to do with the theft.

Peruggia himself was interviewed along with other people who had worked at the museum, and let go. For more than two years, the painting sat hidden in a trunk in his Paris lodgings.

Losing it made it

This is the twist at the heart of the story. Centuries of hanging quietly in palaces and a museum had made the Mona Lisa admired. Two years of being missing made it a worldwide celebrity.

Absence turned a painting into a mystery, and a mystery into a story that newspapers could tell again and again. Every new rumour, false sighting and theory about who had taken it put that enigmatic face back in front of the public. By the time the painting was found, people who had never set foot in an art gallery knew exactly what it looked like.

Rumours that wouldn't die

A theft this strange attracted theories almost at once. Some people wondered whether it was a hoax. One rumour held that the French government had staged it to distract the public from unrest in its colonies. A few months before the painting turned up, the New York Times even speculated that the Louvre had botched a restoration and invented the theft to cover its tracks.

Even after the recovery, some refused to believe that a handful of Italian handymen could have managed it alone. In 1932 an American journalist, Karl Decker, claimed that an Argentine swindler had arranged for six copies to be painted and sold, each to a buyer who believed they owned the original. The tale was repeated in later books, but there is no historical evidence for it.

In a way, the rumours were part of the same story. A painting that people argued about, doubted and imagined hidden in secret collections was a painting everyone was thinking about.

The homecoming

In late 1913, Peruggia finally made his move. He took the painting to Florence and contacted a local art dealer, Alfredo Geri, offering to sell it. Geri brought in Giovanni Poggi, director of the Uffizi Gallery, to examine it. Once they were satisfied it was genuine, the police were called, and Peruggia was arrested in December 1913.

He claimed he had acted out of patriotism, to return a great Italian painting to Italy. A court in Florence convicted him, and he served a short prison sentence.

The painting's return was its own media event. It was shown to large crowds in Florence and other Italian cities before being sent back to France. It went back on the wall at the Louvre in January 1914, and in the first two days after it was rehung, more than 100,000 people came to see it.

Not the only cause

It would be too neat to say the theft alone made the Mona Lisa famous. Leonardo's reputation, the painting's real qualities and the praise it had already won all mattered. And its fame kept growing through the rest of the century, through endless reproductions, travelling exhibitions, advertising and parodies.

But the theft was the turning point. It took a painting known to experts and put it in front of everyone, at a time when mass-circulation newspapers could carry a single image around the world in a matter of days.

Queuing for an empty wall

Today the Mona Lisa hangs behind protective glass, and visitors queue, phones held high, for a few seconds in front of it.

It's worth remembering that some of the first great crowds ever to gather for the Mona Lisa came when it wasn't there. In a way, we're still queuing because they did.