That Time the Mona Lisa Was Stolen out of the Louvre in Broad Daylight; and Why Dalmatians are Firehouse Dogs
It happened on the morning of August 21, 1911, when Italian-born handyman Vincenzo Peruggia simply walked out with it tucked under his arm.
Peruggia had become familiar with the building’s layout a few years before the robbery, when he was working to reframe some of the paintings in their permanent collection, the Mona Lisa included. He wasn’t currently employed by the Louvre when he made his move, but his plan wasn’t dependent on that.
On the day of the theft, he showed up during the museum’s regular visiting hours, but instead of curiously strolling through the galleries like everyone else, he instead hid himself away in a secluded broom closet until after it closed for the night. He bid his time, waiting for the place to clear out completely, and the next morning, took the Mona Lisa off the wall, removed its protective case, and walked out with it hidden inside a rolled up in a smock he’d taken from a maintenance area. Once he was free and clear, he hid it in a trunk his Paris apartment, where it would remain for quite a while.
Even though its absence from its normal place on the wall was noticeable, no museum employees thought to raise the alarm, all figuring, so the story goes, that it had been taken down to be photographed for promotional material. Not so, and when that became clear the following day, the museum was temporarily shut down, the country’s borders were sealed, and the French police opened what turned out to be a long, plodding, and at times aimless investigation.
They were far from short on potential suspects in the early going, but none of them were Peruggia. He was a nobody, unlike the legendary Spanish painter and Parisian transplant Pablo Picasso, whose casual friendship with Belgian art thief Géry Pieret put him squarely in the sights of investigators in the weeks after the painting went missing.
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