The Mona Lisa became famous by being stolen
In 1911 a handyman walked out of the Louvre with the Mona Lisa under his smock. The two years it was missing turned it into the most famous painting in the world.
On Monday 21 August 1911, when the Louvre was closed, Vincenzo Peruggia, an Italian handyman who had once worked at the museum fitting protective glass, took the painting off the wall, removed its frame in a stairwell, and walked out with it under his workman’s smock.
Nobody noticed for more than a day. Staff assumed it was being photographed.
A global story
The theft was front-page news around the world. When the Louvre reopened, crowds queued to look at the empty wall and the four iron hooks. The poet Guillaume Apollinaire was arrested, and his friend Pablo Picasso was questioned, because of an earlier, unrelated case of statuettes stolen from the museum. Both were cleared.
The return
For more than two years Peruggia kept the painting in his Paris room. In December 1913 he tried to sell it to an art dealer in Florence, claiming he wanted to return it to Italy. The dealer called the Uffizi gallery, and Peruggia was arrested. Italy treated him almost as a patriot; he served only a short sentence.
Why it matters
Before 1911 the Mona Lisa was admired by experts but was not in a class of its own. The theft gave it a story and a face that everyone recognised. Fame tends to grow on itself: once something is famous, more people come to see it because it is famous.
Bring it up
“More people came to the Louvre to see the empty space where the Mona Lisa had hung than had come to see the painting itself.”
Follow the thread
- Same patternThe Streisand effect Absence and scandal creating more attention than presence ever did.
- In contrastThe golden ratio is less magic than you’ve heard The fame is often explained by secret proportions; the theft is a better explanation.
- Same patternPandas are almost absent from classical Chinese art Both show that fame can be manufactured by modern events rather than ancient tradition.
