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

The Mona Lisa’s rise was a “centuries-long saga” (164). One of the strangest stories to emerge from it is that of Wilhelm Albert Włodzimierz Apollinaire Kostrowicki, who was known in Paris as Guillaume Apollinaire. He came to Paris and became a poet in the modern new style.

He grew close to a Spanish painter, Pablo Picasso, who had arrived in Paris in 1900 and was revolutionizing perspective with his cubism, which sought to portray every perspective at once. Picasso’s studio became a kind of salon, and Apollinaire his close friend. Together, they rose to fame, but theirs was a fragile fame.

A Belgian native, Géry Pieret was staying with Apollinaire in 1907 when he stole the Louvre’s statues. He found a willing buyer in Picasso, who found them inspiring. Innovative masks from Gabon, Africa, displayed at Paris’s Trocadéro museum provided Picasso with further inspiration.

Underfunded and neglected, the Trocadéro contained artifacts extracted from France’s colonies across west and central Africa. The museum was intended as an educational record, but French curators considered these “primitive objects” from a “primitive culture” (171). These racists assumptions were untrue, and Picasso understood that.

He was on the cusp of a breakthrough in his art, and the artifacts participated in inspiring that innovation, realized in his cubist Les Demoiselle d’Avignon. Today it is understood as an important moment in western art history, but at the time, no one liked it. It would not be shown publicly for 30 years.

Picasso and Apollinaire were both immigrants who worked on the fringes of acceptable society and were connected to anarchists. One had jokingly gifted Picasso a pistol “to go to war against the old traditions of art” (174). Picasso was in the countryside when the Mona Lisa was being investigated. When the Paris-Journal ran its story, he understood the danger and rushed back.

Both artist and art collector, Picasso’s studio was full of art objects, but he did not display the statues acquired from Pieret, which were ancient Iberian art from Picasso’s southern Spanish homeland. It seems likely he commissioned Pieret to steal the statues from the Louvre. Picasso was the “Dr. No” of this story.

When he returned to Paris, he and Apollinaire planned to throw the statues into the Seine but, for whatever reason, did not follow through. Instead, Apollinaire delivered the statues to the Paris-Journal, claiming that he brought them in as soon as he realized they might be stolen. It was a lie that would not survive close scrutiny.

Pieret then made the situation worse by writing a public letter, printed in the Paris-Journal, urging the Mona Lisa thief to put himself in the newspaper’s hands. The letter gave the impression that he knew more than he revealed, an invitation to the Paris police to investigate everyone associated with him, which they subsequently did.

Within a day, detectives searched Apollinare’s home and found Pieret’s letters. They arrested him for sheltering Pieret and helping him escape Paris. Believing they were following “a gang of international thieves” (183), they charged Apollinaire with stealing the Mona Lisa and jailed him. Still haunted by the idea of an “enemy within” (183), the French press convicted him. When Lépine visited him in prison, Apollinaire talked.

The police arrived at Picasso’s home in the early morning to bring him to court. There, he saw a disheveled, distraught Apollinaire paraded through a throng of photographers and stared. Picasso was terrified. When asked by a judge if he knew Apollinaire, Picasso claimed never to have seen him before. At one of the hardest moments of his life, Apollinaire felt abandoned by his closest friend.

Apollinaire admitted to everything but stealing the Mona Lisa. Even the police, who were desperate to find the perpetrator, had to admit neither Picasso nor Apollinaire were the international thieves they had imagined. They had no case. Picasso was released, but his confidence was shattered.

Within a week, Apollinaire was also released, but the charges against him remained in place for months. Depressed and fearful of being deported, Apollinaire had lost his reputation. Though not involved with the theft, he remained associated with it for the rest of his life.

Meanwhile, Lépine still had no information about who had stolen the Mona Lisa.

A decade after beginning the Mona Lisa, Leonardo was in Rome, where a Medici family pope, Leo X, was spending lavishly to commission new art. Lisa did not have her portrait, and no one knew if Leonardo would finish it.

He was well known in Renaissance Italian courts but still an outsider and excluded from his father’s will. Leonardo’s Roman commission went predictably badly. He was pouring everything into the Mona Lisa. He spent nights dissecting corpses and meticulously recording exactly what he observed. Contrary to the beliefs of his time, he realized the heart is the central organ, which would not become common knowledge until the 1960s. Dissection was against the laws of the Roman Catholic Church. Leonardo was ordered to stop, and he obeyed.

Exuberant young French king, Francis I, passed through Rome while Leonardo was there and invited him to join his court. At 64, an advanced age for the time, Leonardo traveled through the alps to France with the Mona Lisa strapped to a mule’s back.

Francis adored Leonardo and asked only that he converse on whatever subjects Francis proposed. Leonardo died at 66, by some accounts with Francis at his bedside.

One of his assistants inherited the Mona Lisa, then Francis purchased it. When the Louvre began its life as a museum after the French Revolution, the Mona Lisa was not considered one of its finest paintings. Leonardo’s Virgin of the Rocks was more highly esteemed, but not nearly as highly as the works of Raphael.

The painting seemed destined for obscurity, but instead, Mona Lisa became the dangerous and mysterious woman she is known as today.

Some 60 years earlier, influential French poet and critic Théophile Gautier had ushered in the Mona Lisa’s transformation. He saw women as a contradictory mix of “gentle and manipulative, hot and cold, heaven and hell” (199). He could have projected this idea onto any painting, but he chose the Mona Lisa, and it shaped her story. He was the first to write about her smile in hundreds of years, but now it became a mystery everyone saw. Other prominent men fixated on the Mona Lisa. One artist even leapt to his death having, as he wrote in his death by suicide note, “grappled desperately with her smile” (200).

She became “an icon of the Romantic age,” emblematic of its preoccupation with love as “the highest form of insanity” (201). English critic Walter Pater wrote a lavish ode to her, which Irish writer Oscar Wilde later said shaped his response to the painting. For Wilde, critics determined the meaning of art, which is precisely what Gautier and Pater achieved.

A small number of obsessive men who lived more than 150 years ago shaped how the Mona Lisa is viewed today, but she still would not have become an icon without another improbable event.

By autumn, the investigation for the Mona Lisa had no leads, and the newspapers moved on to other sensational stories, including the Titanic’s sinking. The investigation was closed in 1913, and the Louvre issued its verdict that the Mona Lisa was unlikely ever to return to the Louvre. Appropriately, a Raphael portrait took its place in the Salon Carré.

In November 1913, successful Florentine art dealer Alfredo Geri received a letter from a man called Leonard, who claimed to have the Mona Lisa. Complaining that the Louvre was a storehouse of loot stolen from Italy by Napoleon, he asked for Geri’s help to bring the Mona Lisa home. Geri was skeptical but brought the matter to Giovanni Poggi, the director of the Uffizi. Poggi said he would need to examine the painting to determine its authenticity.

Leonard agreed but canceled twice before finally turning up in Florence. He did not produce the painting but affirmed its authenticity by admitting he had stolen it. Geri told him to come back the following day so the Uffizi’s director could authenticate it.

The following day, the three men walked to Leonard’s cheap hotel, and he produced the painting, hidden in the false bottom of his trunk. Poggi compared the portrait with his photos of it and knew it was authentic. Now, they needed to figure out how “to steal a painting from a thief” (212). Poggi told Leonard they needed to take the painting to the Uffizi to further confirm its authenticity.

Leonard accompanied Poggi and Geri to the Uffizi, where Poggi again examined it against photos of its craquelure, the cracks that develop over time on artworks, which cannot be forged. Again, they proved the painting’s authenticity. Poggi told Leonard the painting was not secure at the hotel and would need to stay at the Uffizi. Leonard agreed. He returned to his hotel, and an hour later, the Florence police arrived at his door.

A legion of experts agreed that the Mona Lisa had been found. Italy rejoiced that the painting had returned to its birthplace, blocks away from where Lisa may have sat for Leonardo. Its thief proved to be a new character: the “Patriotic Italian” (216).

“Leonard” was the alias of 30-year-old Vincenzo Perugia. Like many Italians, he had emigrated as a young man seeking economic opportunities. In Paris, he worked as a house painter. He confessed to stealing the painting, telling the Italian police he was not a thief but a hero.

In January 1911, Perugia was working for the firm that installed the glass boxes around the paintings and had learned how they were hung. Walking through the Louvre’s large Italian collection, he “marveled at the scale of Napoleon’s plunder” and resolved to engineer “a triumphant homecoming” for Mona Lisa, and for himself in the process (217).

Italians agreed that Perugia was a hero and sent him gifts. He became a celebrity among the people but remained in jail.

Lost in the surge of patriotism around Perugia’s claims to have repatriated the Mona Lisa was that Napoleon had not stolen it. Leonardo himself had brought the painting to France. The Italian government agreed to return the painting to its “foster country” (222). Before doing so, Mona Lisa enjoyed a tour of Italy, “the first traveling blockbuster art exhibition in history” (222). Tens of thousands of Italians showed up to see it.

Record-smashing crowds turned up to see the Mona Lisa upon its return to Paris, but the painting had changed. It had become mythical, legendary.

The French did not ask for Perugia to be extradited. Italy held a trial, but it was primarily a fact-finding mission. Under the microscope, his patriotic story fell apart. He had been arrested two times for attempted robbery and kept a list of potential buyers for the painting, few of whom were Italian. People wondered if there was more to the story. After love letters were discovered in Perugia’s room, newspapers seized on the idea of a doomed romance, but it was not true.

The trial exposed Perugia, but it also exposed Lépine and Bertillon. They had known the theft was likely an inside job but never seriously pursued Perugia. They had questioned him and caught him in a lie. They even had his fingerprints on file. Since he didn’t fit their theory, French authorities continued to believe there was more to the story.

In his final defense of Perugia, his lawyer noted that Perugia did not harm the Mona Lisa; he made her famous. His words were met with cheers. Perugia was released. The following day, Gavrilo Princip assassinated archduke Franz Ferdinand, which led to World War I. The Mona Lisa’s discovery was the world’s “final feel-good story” (231).

Twenty years after the Mona Lisa’s recovery, another story—entirely fabricated—claimed that there was a criminal mastermind behind the theft, a swindler from Argentina called Eduardo de Valfierno. The story was the work of an American journalist, Karl Decker, for the Saturday Evening Post. Decker was known for fabricating stories, but people continued to believe it, because it brought together all the narratives that people expected and wanted to hear.

The Mona Lisa conspiracies echo in the current age. The problem with conspiracies is that they are difficult to disprove, as “belief matters more than facts” (238). Lépine and Bertillon could have solved the crime, but their assumptions hampered them.

Leonardo da Vinci could have solved the theft, however, because he observed free of expectations, open to finding anything.

The Mona Lisa has outlived everyone who was part of her story.

Cesar Borgia died alone in a Spanish ambush and was shown no mercy by the knights who attacked him, as he had shown no mercy for anyone else. Apollinaire was wounded serving for France in World War I and died in 1918 during the flu epidemic. Picasso died in his nineties as “[t]he titan of 20th century art” (244) but still ashamed that he denied knowing Apollinaire. Vincenzo Perugia returned to his hometown a hero and survived his service in the Italian army during World War I, opening a paint store after it.

Following her husband’s death, Lisa Gherardini spent her final years in a convent, never having received her finished portrait or knowing “the bizarre afterlife that awaited her” (246).

The final page of Leonardo’s notebook features geometry problems and a final note: “Because the soup is getting cold” (248).

Today, the Mona Lisa is “famous for being famous” (250). When it last toured the US in the 1960s, it had a Secret Service detail and traveled in a fireproof, waterproof case. Its fame exceeds that of the Louvre, drawing huge crowds who take bad photos of it. Day speculates that perhaps Leonardo, who was driven by curiosity to know everything, would visit his painting only to turn his back on it and “observe the crowds instead” (252).