On the morning of August 22, 1911, a Louvre employee named Picquet entered the Salon Carré to do some touching-up work on one of the paintings.
He noticed the room looked slightly different. After a moment, he identified the problem.
There was an empty hook on the wall where, the day before, the Mona Lisa had hung.
He assumed it had been taken to be photographed — a routine occurrence. It was not until later that morning, when the museum's photographer confirmed he had not requested the painting, that anyone thought to raise an alarm.
By then, Leonardo da Vinci's masterpiece had been missing for approximately 24 hours.
How it was stolen
The thief was Vincenzo Peruggia, an Italian carpenter who had previously worked at the Louvre installing protective cases for the museum's paintings — including, ironically, the box around the Mona Lisa herself.
On the night of Sunday August 20th, Peruggia hid inside a supply closet until the museum closed. In the early hours of Monday morning, he walked to the Salon Carré, lifted the painting from the wall, carried it to a stairwell, removed it from its frame, hid it under his coat, and walked out of a service entrance.
He then took the Paris Métro home.
The entire operation took approximately 15 minutes. Nobody saw him.
Two years under a bed
France was devastated. The Louvre was closed for an entire week. More than 60 witnesses were interviewed. Pablo Picasso was briefly arrested as a suspect. The poet Guillaume Apollinaire was held for a week.
Neither was involved.
For two years and three months, the Mona Lisa was stored under Peruggia's bed in a Paris apartment, wrapped in red velvet.
Peruggia had not planned for what to do with it. He eventually tried to sell it to an art dealer in Florence, who contacted the authorities.
The Mona Lisa was recovered undamaged on December 11, 1913.
The theft that created an icon
Before the theft, the Mona Lisa was respected but not uniquely famous. It was one of many masterpieces in the Louvre.
The theft changed everything. During the two years it was missing, newspapers ran photographs and descriptions constantly. Crowds came to the Louvre specifically to stare at the empty space on the wall — the absence of the painting was itself an attraction.
When it returned, it toured Italy before coming back to Paris. Enormous crowds attended each stop. By the time it was rehung in the Louvre, the Mona Lisa had become, for the first time, truly famous — recognised by people who had never been to a museum in their lives.
Peruggia did not intend to create the world's most famous painting. But he did.
What happened to Peruggia
He was sentenced to 12 months in prison — widely viewed as lenient. He returned to France, ran a paint shop, and died in 1925, largely forgotten.
The Mona Lisa survived him by centuries, and continues to survive us all.
Seeing her today
When you stand in the Salle des États and look at the Mona Lisa — smaller than you expected, behind bulletproof glass, surrounded by phone cameras — remember that you are looking at a painting that once spent two years under a carpenter's bed, carried out of this museum on a Monday morning on the Paris Métro.
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