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

Forensic science was a fairly new technology in 1911. Previously, the police were charged with maintaining order, not solving crimes. Now, thanks partly to Louis Lépine, the police were learning how to conduct police work. Lépine partnered with forensics science pioneer Alphonse Bertillon. Together, they made a “superhero duo of early criminology” (63), but they had flaws.

Now a crime scene, the Louvre remained closed and occupied by the police. The Mona Lisa’s theft “was a national embarrassment” (64). During the search, the theft itself became art. The investigation revealed that security was careless and unsystematic. Everything might be either suspicious or normal, but it was difficult to know which.

Paupardin told police that the Mona Lisa had a quiet but consistent German “suitor” (67). A man matching his description was questioned and released: He had not been anywhere near Paris on August 21. Another witness recalled seeing a man leaving the Louvre with a rectangular package, and he had thrown something in a ditch. The breakthrough ultimately led to nothing since the witness could provide no relevant clues about the man’s appearance.

Identifying criminals posed a challenge for early police forces because they lacked reliable systems for keeping track of people. Alphonse Bertillon changed that. He developed a laborious, highly specific system of measuring every part of a human body. The Bertillon system was inspired by anthropometry, though it had “a horrible history” (70). It was used to justify “racist claims about groups” (70). Bertillon used it to identify prison escapees.

Approximately 10 years before the Mona Lisa was stolen, Marie-François Goron was convinced a wealthy, respected Parisian, Charles Vernet, was actually convicted murderer Simon, who had escaped from prison. Goron devised an elaborate trick to publicly measure Vernet, then arrested him. Vernet later confessed. The “very public demonstration” (73) made Bertillon a legend.

However, by the time of the Mona Lisa’s theft, Bertillon and his scientific methods had become a laughingstock. Bertillon had testified against Alfred Dreyfus, who was wrongly accused of treason and convicted largely because he was Jewish. When the truth of Dreyfus’s innocence was later revealed, Bertillon’s reputation was damaged, and the danger of pseudo-science exposed.

Following the theft, a Paris-Journal headline asked if Arsène Lupin was alive, but Arsène Lupin was not real. He was a fictional character. Fiction and reality were blurring, and it started more than a century earlier with a story “too strange to be anything but true” (77).

Eugène François Vidocq was a master of disguise. When the police finally caught him, they appointed him head of their undercover unit, leveraging his vast network of criminal contacts. The deal worked, but the public was suspicious. After Vidocq was finally forced out, he founded “the first private detective agency in the world,” pioneering “scientific methods in policing” (78). His story inspired Edgar Allan Poe, Arthur Conan Doyle, and Victor Hugo.

His story also inspired real-life detectives to elevate their methods. The year before the Mona Lisa was stolen, Edmond Locard, a criminologist in Lyon, used his newly developed fingerprint identification methods to find the thief stealing jewelry from wealthy homes one piece at a time. His main clue was the strange fingerprints discovered at the scene. He ordered organ-grinders and their monkeys to the police station, then fingerprinted the monkeys until he found his culprit. Louise Lépine and Alphonse Bertillon thus had a lot to live up to.

Bertillon’s measuring identification system was laborious and difficult to implement effectively. It generated a vast number of police files. By contrast, England had implemented a fingerprint system that enabled efficient comparison of existing samples. Scottish doctor Henry Faulds had first proposed that each person has a unique and unalterable fingerprint. He had been ignored for years. Charles Darwin’s cousin, Francis Galton, eventually stole his ideas.

Though Bertillon preferred his own system, he agreed to add fingerprints to his cards. However, lacking an efficient system for comparing prints meant police needed a suspect to test against any fingerprints found at the scene.

Bertillon did not have any suspects, but he did have the antique frame and glass box, which the thief had discarded in the stairwell. Bertillon meticulously tested it and found a single thumbprint on the glass pane. He then staged two recreations of the crime, one by thieves with no knowledge of the Louvre and a second with thieves employed at the museum. The former removed the painting in five minutes, the latter in five seconds. The conclusion: It must have been “an inside job” (86).

After 15 years in Florence, a monastery commissioned Leonardo to create an altarpiece. He painted a vivid Adoration of the Magi but never finished it. It is now housed in Florence’s Uffizi Museum.

Leonardo abandoned Florence for Milan, writing an audacious letter of introduction to the city’s duke, who was striving to cultivate a Milanese Renaissance. The letter contained many promises and one truth: That he could sculpt and paint as well as any other. Once there, he was introduced as a musician, a skilled lyre player who sang and improvised his own poetry. Leonardo was the first Renaissance man, someone who is good at many unrelated skills.

Milan had the kind of people Leonardo most longed to meet: mathematicians, philosophers, doctors. His notebooks exploded with questions and ideas. His mind worked the opposite way than others’. Others began with theories that might have nothing to do with reality. Leonardo began with observations, then developed and tested theories to explain those observations. He conducted experiments, created a record of the human body, and staged extravagant spectacles for the carnivals and festivals of his time. He was happy in Milan and planned to stay.

Leonardo was commissioned to sculpt a horse and planned a 25-foot-high bronze statue to be cast in one piece, contrary to the methods of the time. To prepare, he observed and dissected horses and wrote a book on horse anatomy. The clay model he created became “the wonder of Milan” (97). The French then invaded Italy. The duke needed bronze for cannons and appropriated the bronze reserved for Leonardo’s statue. He was heartbroken.

Leonardo’s next artistic innovation was a mural, The Last Supper. Unwilling to follow the time-tested methods for painting a fresco with water-based paints on wet plaster, Leonardo figured out how to use his favored oil paints. The result was a wonder, but within 50 years, the paint flaked off and became barely visible. The existing Last Supper is a heavily restored “glimpse of what Leonardo actually painted” (100).

Leonardo remained in Milan for six weeks following the arrival of the French army, playing both sides. Now 50 years old, he was forced to flee from the city. The invader King Charles VIII was “foolish and reckless” (102), but because of him, Leonardo returned to Florence, enabling the creation of the Mona Lisa.

Before the theft, the Louvre welcomed scarcely a few hundred daily visitors. After the police reopened it, thousands of Parisians came every day. People who had never seen the Mona Lisa now came to stare at the empty space where she used to hang, leaving bouquets and notes. Future writer Franz Kafka visited with his friend Max Brod, and they made a comic silent film about the theft, depicting the Louvre administrators and police as incompetent and the museum so chaotic that no one notices when the thief returns the painting.

The Louvre’s ineptitude became the subject of national mockery, while the Mona Lisa decorated chocolate boxes, was used to sell cigarettes, and had songs “written in her honor” (107). The story reached other countries, and was covered in the US, Canada, Australia, and England. With newspapers now able to reproduce illustrations effectively and economically, illustrated supplements made Mona Lisa “the most prominent face in the world” (107). She could be seen everywhere, except the Louvre.

Bertillon had a thumbprint but no suspects. Almost 300 people worked at the Louvre; many others were former employees or familiar with its display methods. Art theft by individuals was a relatively new phenomenon in 1911. Previously, nations had plundered art, including much of the Louvre’s Italian art, which Napoleon brought back after invading Italy.

Lépine and Bertillon did not operate as Leonardo had: They began with assumptions, then built theories. They imagined the type of person who would steal art: A “Secret Admirer,” “Lone Madman,” or “Consummate Professional” (110). The latter was preferred because it suggested a higher class of criminal, the type of adversary that Lépine and Bertillon’s thought worthy of them.

This led to a suspect, American Adam Worth. The police knew he was the perpetrator of bank heists and forgeries but could never catch him because he never made errors. After moving to England, he assumed the life of an English gentleman in London. In 1876, he stole Thomas Gainsborough’s Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, “[t]he Mona Lisa of its day” (113). Parallels between the two heists suggested he must be the criminal responsible, even though he had died the previous decade.

Worth had created the mold, and the police would find someone to fit that model.