The Mona Lisa Vanishes: A Legendary Painter, a Shocking Heist, and the Birth of a Global Celebrity

On Monday, August 21, 1911, a man in a white smock walked out of the Louvre Museum with the Mona Lisa. The world was changing at “breakneck” speed (7), and new inventions would shape what happened next.

The Louvre had been a medieval fortress, then a palace. After the French Revolution, it became a museum. It was cavernous, full of “nooks and crannies” (5). Earlier in 1911, a journalist exposed the museum’s poor security by hiding in the museum overnight. The man who stole the Mona Lisa likewise hid overnight in a storage closet near the Salon Carré, where it was displayed.

On Monday, the museum was closed, though various workers and guards were on site. The man waited for passing footsteps to recede, then walked out of the storage closet wearing the white smock of a Louvre maintenance worker. He removed the painting from its hooks, freed it from its display box, hid it under his smock, and then ducked into a stairwell.

The door he intended to escape from was locked, but a plumber, taking the man for an authorized worker, opened it for him. The entrance guard was away from his post.

A year earlier, the Louvre’s director had laughed off the idea that the Mona Lisa could be stolen, but the painting also was not well known at that time. It became famous because it was stolen at the dawn of a new age “of conspiracy theories and instant celebrity” (16).

The story of its theft is the story of how it “became the most famous painting in the world” (16). It is also the story of how to look at the world “without assumptions or expectations” (16), exactly how Leonardo da Vinci himself had lived.

The footsteps the man heard from his storage hiding place belonged to the head of the Louvre’s maintenance and his crew. The group paused at the Mona Lisa, known in French as La Joconde, and the head remarked that it was “the most valuable painting in the world” (19). They were the last who would see the Mona Lisa on display for a long while.

An hour later, they passed through the Salon Carré and noticed that the painting was missing, but the head assumed someone had removed it for safe keeping. He did not mention its absence to anyone.

Brigadier Paupardin was the Salon Carré’s guard. Like all Louvre guards, he was a retired French army officer who never expected anything to happen. Paupardin noticed the Mona Lisa was missing but assumed it was being photographed. The Louvre’s entire collection was being photographed, a new and rapidly improving technology. Photographers would take paintings without asking or telling anyone and return them “at their leisure” (23).

A few years earlier, after a painting had been cut up, the Louvre had installed protective glass around its most prized paintings. Critics complained visitors would no longer see the paintings, only their own reflections. One such critic shaved in front of a Rembrandt to prove his point. That Tuesday, another critic, Louis Béroud, planned to paint a girl styling her hair reflected in the Mona Lisa.

When Béroud arrived in the Salon Carré, Paupardin told him photographers had taken the painting. As time passed, and the painting remained absent, Béroud asked Paupardin to check on it. The photographers did not have it. With the director away, Paupardin reported its absence to the second in charge, George Bénédite.

They simply could not believe it had been stolen. They checked the Salon Carré and photography studio again but had to concede that it was missing. Since the phone lines were not private, Bénédite walked to the police station to report the theft.

If Béroud had not gone to the Louvre that day, it could have been days or a week before the Mona Lisa’s theft was discovered. The Louvre was lucky Béroud got bored and sent Paupardin to the photographers. The Louvre would not be lucky for long: It was about to become a laughingstock.

The chief of the Paris Police, Louis Lépine, was a “legend in his own time” (30). He led the city’s fire department and division of the army, and he had saved the French government in the 1890s when riots threatened to tip into revolution. He ordered the museum locked and searched by a legion of officers, informing museum staff it was a plumbing problem. He felt certain the painting would be found on the premises, but in case it was not, he ordered France’s borders sealed and all trains and ships searched.

When the police found the Mona Lisa’s empty antique frame and glass box, Bénédite announced its absence, admitting they had no clues about who committed the crime.

Imagine telling Louis Béroud that the Mona Lisa is finally free “from its glass prison” (33). It is no longer at risk of being used as a shaving mirror, but it also has an audience of only one: the thief.

Within a day, Paris had become obsessed with the Mona Lisa. For a month, newspapers ran daily cover stories on it, building its status as a legend. While the stories were daily reminders of failure to those investigating its theft, the story itself arrived at the perfect moment in history.

Literacy had surged in the last century, resulting in newspapers experiencing a “golden age” (36). It was one of many facets of life that was changing in 1911, including much-improved city sanitation, cars, the first airplanes, and the Paris Métro. Train and air travel had shrunk distances between people. Radio, film, and electricity were also revolutionizing the world (37).

With his cubism, Pablo Picasso was revolutionizing perspective, and Albert Einstein had revolutionized the understanding of time and space. The world was changing in ways people could not understand, and an inexplicable theft “fit right in” (38). In this way, it resembled the world that produced the Mona Lisa.

Leonardo da Vinci was born on April 15, 1452, at “the height of the Renaissance,” a time of “cultural and scientific reawakening” and “great possibility and intensity” (43). Leonardo’s father, Ser Piero di Antonio, was a notary, a stable and respectable profession, and his mother, Caterina, a peasant. Leonardo’s parents were not married and could never marry, which meant that Leonardo was not officially his father’s son and could not inherit either his status or his profession.

Ser Piero arranged a marriage for Caterina to another peasant, after which she disappeared from Leonardo’s life and the historical record. Leonardo’s paternal grandparents raised him among his legitimate siblings, but Leonardo was always an outsider. This turned out to be an advantage, for it meant he could not “afford the luxuries of assumptions or illusions” (45). Instead, he would be forced to make his own way in the world.

As a teenager, Leonardo moved to Florence to apprentice with a painter, Andrea del Verrocchio. The people of this time did not know they were living in what would be called the “Renaissance” (46). They only knew that the old social rules had gone, and new ones had “yet to arrive” (46). It was a time of great possibility but also instability.

Under Verrocchio, Leonardo learned to paint and reinvented painting. He invented a technique called sfumato, which eliminated the edges that make “paintings look painted” (47). This technique could only be achieved with the rising popularity of oil paint, which allowed painters to build layers.

While an apprentice, Leonardo worked with Verrocchio on The Baptism of Christ. The angel he was assigned was so radiant and lifelike that, after seeing it, Verrocchio abandoned painting. Ser Piero brought Leonardo a shield to decorate. Using parts of dissected animals, he painted a “fantastical monster” (48). Ser Piero almost fainted when he saw it, then sold it for a massive profit.

Leonardo did not care about acquiring money or power but desired knowledge. Curiosity drove him. He filled notebooks with observations and questions. This made it difficult for him to finish anything but also freed him from assumptions and presumptions.

Leonardo had the skills to open a studio and earn a good living, but his questions and thirst for knowledge drove him to seek more. Biographical anecdotes about Leonardo agree that he was attractive, charismatic, and strong, attracting a throng of admirers, while his detractors dismissed him as a “pretty boy who can’t deliver the goods” (54). He failed to complete his first post-apprenticeship commission to paint an altarpiece for the chapel of Florence’s Town Hall.

On the day he received the commission, Lisa Gherardini, the girl who would change Leonardo’s life, was born nearby. Like the Town Hall, she would not receive the product of her commission either.