You Don't Need the Mona Lisa. A Wall and a Good Story Are Enough.

Between seven and eight on the morning of Monday, August 21, 1911, while the Louvre is closed to the public, the Mona Lisa is carried away.

According to Stefano Agnoli in the Corriere della Sera¹, by eight o'clock it was all over. For more than a day, however, nobody notices²,³.

It is one of the most famous thefts in the history of art, but that is not why we are telling it. We are telling it because of what happens next: when the museum reopens, people queue up. Not to see a masterpiece, which is no longer there, but to look at an empty wall⁷,⁸.

In this article we reconstruct the case like a detective story, with an Italian thief, a painter who insists, a poet in jail and a suspect named Picasso. Then we ask what it teaches those who run a museum, a village or another cultural site: before it is a work, a collection is a story to be told.

The thief who knew the place

The culprit is Vincenzo Peruggia (the surname also appears as Perugia), a house painter and decorator from Dumenza, in the province of Varese, who had emigrated to Paris in his early twenties¹,². He had worked at the Louvre: in 1910, after a threatening letter to the museum, the glazing firm he worked for had put a dozen paintings under glass, the Mona Lisa among them, and Peruggia was one of the workmen²,³.

It sounds incredible, but stealing it was less difficult than one might think. The Louvre was then the largest building in the world, with over a thousand rooms, and fewer than 150 guards watched over roughly a quarter of a million objects². On Mondays, the closing day, a dozen guards stayed on duty instead of the usual eighty; the Mona Lisa, Lloyd's Weekly Newspaper reported in 1911, hung from an ordinary metal wire fixed on four nails, and an expert thief could have unhooked it and carried it off in half a minute⁶.

Accounts differ on exactly how Peruggia got in. According to Agnoli in the Corriere, there are two versions: hidden in a closet the evening before, or taking advantage of the lax security at dawn to enter, as a workman, the empty Salon Carré¹. According to James Zug in Smithsonian Magazine and to NPR, Peruggia and the brothers Vincenzo and Michele Lancelotti spent the night between Sunday and Monday in a storeroom near the gallery²,³. The 1913 press, instead, reported that he had acted alone⁶, which is also the hypothesis Kuper considers most likely⁷. On one point the sources agree: reaching the painting required no break-in. Wearing white workmen's smocks, they took the painting down, went down a service staircase and removed the frame and the glass case¹,².

The time was reconstructed by the police of the day: between 7:00 and 8:15. A foreman named Picquet had passed through the Salon Carré at 7:00 and had pointed out the Mona Lisa to his colleagues; an hour and a quarter later, on his way back, he no longer found it⁶. To get out, Kuper recounts, the thief found a locked door with no handle: a plumber named Sauvet opened it for him with a key and a pair of pliers⁷.

More than a day of silence

For more than a day nobody noticed anything: 26 hours according to the Smithsonian², 28 according to the authors cited by NPR³. It was not that strange. In those weeks paintings were taken up to the roof in turn to be photographed, because the cameras of the time worked poorly indoors, and a canvas missing from the wall alarmed no one³.

On Tuesday morning it was noticed by the painter Louis Béroud, who often went to the Louvre to copy paintings. According to the Corriere he was with the engraver Frédéric Laguillermie¹. On the wall he found four iron hooks and no Mona Lisa². The guard on duty was not worried: he thought the canvas was in the photography studio⁴. Béroud, NPR recounts, could not work without the painting and managed to persuade a guard to go and check. The guard came back saying the photographers did not have it³.

Only then did the alarm go off. The curator and the police were informed, and the frame and glass case were found in the service staircase leading to the cour Visconti⁴. The museum was cleared, the gates were closed and every corner was searched, with no result⁶.

The news did not break right away. According to the Smithsonian, Monday's and Tuesday's morning papers did not mention it, until the Louvre issued a statement late on Tuesday evening². The next day, Le Gaulois reported that an exhausted curator kept repeating that, by comparison, the Moroccan diplomatic crisis, then on the front pages, was a minor incident⁴,⁵.

A week of chaos

The Louvre stayed closed for seven days³,⁷. The police questioned employees and former employees and took their fingerprints, a technique still new in 1911, but none matched the one left by the thief⁷. Peruggia was questioned like the other workmen and said he had learned of the theft from the newspapers². The paradox, Simon Kuper recounts in the Financial Times, is that the police did have his prints: Alphonse Bertillon, the famous investigator of the day, however, filed only right-hand prints, and Peruggia had left a left-hand one⁷.

Meanwhile the leads multiplied. The New York Times spoke of sixty detectives on the trail of the painting³. A plot by the Kaiser was suspected, and even J.P. Morgan as the mastermind³; the press reported two men detained near Bordeaux, then released without evidence⁶. On September 1 the Daily News wrote that the director of the French national museums and the curator of the Louvre had been dismissed⁶. The director, Jean Théophile Homolle, before leaving on vacation had reassured the press: to think of stealing from the Louvre, he had said, was like thinking of stealing the towers of Notre-Dame⁷.

The lead that seemed most promising put a poet in jail. At the end of August a Belgian adventurer, Géry Pieret, sold Le Journal an Iberian statuette stolen from the Louvre, and the police imagined a gang of art thieves⁷. Pieret had been a guest of Guillaume Apollinaire and a friend of Pablo Picasso, who kept two statuettes taken by him at home⁷. On September 7 Apollinaire was arrested and gave Picasso's name; Picasso, before the judge, went as far as saying he had never seen the poet⁷. In the end the police acknowledged that neither of them had anything to do with the Mona Lisa⁴.

The queue to look at a wall

When the Louvre reopened, something never seen before happened. For the first time in its history the museum had a queue at the entrance⁷,⁸. Thousands of people entered the Salon Carré not to see a masterpiece, but to look at a wall with four iron hooks and nothing else²,⁸. According to Zug, among them was a young Franz Kafka, traveling in Paris with his friend Max Brod: for the two writers that void was a stain of shame on the Parisians²,³,⁷.

A Canadian newspaper of the time, the Ottawa Free Press, described "extraordinary scenes" at the reopening of the galleries: many women visitors brought bunches of red and white roses, and a distraught-looking woman claimed to be the Mona Lisa returned and wanted to be put back in her frame⁶.

The French writer Jérôme Coignard, cited by Kuper, saw in it an involuntary insight: the Louvre was staging the first conceptual installation in the history of art, namely the absence of a painting⁷.

For an institution that had lost its most precious piece, it is a curious result: the public's attention, for the first time, had shifted from the work to the story about it.

Two years later: the thief gives himself away

As the months went by, the Mona Lisa was given up for lost. In December 1912 the Louvre hung a portrait by Raphael on the wall that had been left empty⁷. Peruggia, meanwhile, kept the painting at home: in the false bottom of a trunk, according to Zug², or mostly on the kitchen table, according to Kuper⁷.

What gave him away was the attempt to sell it. According to the Corriere he first wrote to a London antiques dealer, signing himself "Vincent Leonard", without receiving a reply¹; at the trial a trip to London also emerged, where the dealer Duveen allegedly laughed in his face⁷. At the end of 1913 he tried again in Florence, with a letter signed "Leonardo" to the antiques dealer Alfredo Geri⁷. He asked for 500,000 lire and set one condition: the painting had to stay in Italy¹,⁴. Geri alerted Giovanni Poggi, director of the Uffizi, and the two arranged a meeting in a hotel room¹,⁷. Poggi recognized the work by the pattern of cracks on the panel; according to NPR, a stamp on the back also confirmed it³,⁷.

Peruggia was arrested. He said he had done it out of patriotism, convinced that the Mona Lisa had been taken from Italy by Napoleon³. A mistaken belief: according to Kuper's reconstruction, it was bought by Francis I, apparently in a regular transaction, for 4,000 gold scudi⁷; the Corriere notes that, according to historical sources, it was Salaì, Leonardo's pupil and heir, who sold the painting¹. A thief, then, driven by a wrong story.

The trial was held in Florence in June 1914 and the sentence was mild: a little over seven months in prison according to Kuper and the British Newspaper Archive⁶,⁷, eight according to NPR and the Smithsonian²,³. A few days later the First World War broke out, and the case vanished from the front pages³. Peruggia died in 1925, on his forty-fourth birthday⁶,⁷.

The Mona Lisa, for its part, returned to Paris after a triumphant tour of Italy, with packed exhibitions in Florence, Milan and Rome². Le Petit Parisien of January 5, 1914 reports that Parisians were admitted to file past the painting from ten in the morning, with a single entrance, cloakrooms set up under the palace arcades and uniformed and plainclothes officers escorting the crowd⁴,⁵. In the first two days more than a hundred thousand people saw it².

The real twist: an icon is born

The theft, though, is not the most interesting part. What is interesting is what happened to the Mona Lisa while it was gone.

Before 1911 it was a respected painting, not a star. According to James Zug it was not even the most famous painting in its room³. The 1878 Baedeker guide to Paris devoted a paragraph to it, and in 1907 only two sentences, far less than it gave to the Winged Victory of Samothrace or the Venus de Milo². It was not unknown, however: it was the only painting in the Louvre with a mailbox for the love letters it received⁸.

After the theft everything changed. The Louvre announced the news and newspapers around the world ran full-page headlines; on the walls of Paris posters appeared with the painting to be found². Satirical postcards, a short film and cabaret songs followed: popular culture, Zug writes, took a work of art and turned it into a mass phenomenon². Kuper recalls a song that mocked the museum (they guarded it all the time, except on Mondays) and the face of the Mona Lisa used to advertise cigarettes and corsets⁷. A British film magazine, Kinematograph Weekly, was already listing on September 28, 1911 a comedy titled The Disappearance of the Mona Lisa⁶. In New York a parish organized a paid tableau vivant staging the very room of the Louvre and the theft⁶.

For the historian Donald Sassoon, cited by Kuper, a painting had been turned into a person, a celebrity; by choosing that very painting, Peruggia helped put it above all the others, and this, Kuper writes, together with a good story, is his legacy⁷. R.A. Scotti, taken up by Isis Magazine, puts it this way: the Mona Lisa left the Louvre as a work of art and returned to it as an icon⁸.

It must be said that not all historians agree. The Smithsonian notes that many remain reluctant to credit the thief with making the painting famous, and that its artistic value had been recognized by critics since the 1860s².

The most widespread view remains this one, however: what made it the most famous work in the world was not the canvas, but the story built around it.

What our data say

amuseapp's internal data show the same dynamic, with less mystery. Among visits of at least one minute, those who start an audio stay a median of 50 minutes. Those who do not, 15.

Visitors stay if someone tells them a story.

It is the same lesson as 1911: what keeps people there is not only what they have in front of them, but the story someone knows how to tell.

You don't need the Mona Lisa: you need your story

Every cultural site has a story that visitors do not yet know. Sometimes it is inside an object, sometimes in a building, in a figure, in a forgotten episode. The work we do with amuseapp is finding it together with those who run the site and turning it into a visit that people remember.

• We find the story. We start from your site, not from a template. What works, rooms or stories does it hold?
• We build the narrative. An audioguide does not read captions aloud: it gives the visit a through line, with a beginning, a tension and a close.
• We add the curiosities. Details, anecdotes and hidden stories that visitors would hardly discover on their own, and that are the ones they later tell their friends.
• A route designed for children. A dedicated narrative, with language and pacing suited to the youngest, so the family visit does not force anyone to settle.
• A different tone for every visitor. The same story can be told differently to an enthusiast, a passing tourist or a family, and in the language of the visitor.

You don't need to have the Mona Lisa. You just need to know how to tell well what you have.

Sources

1. Stefano Agnoli, "Il furto della Gioconda, 106 anni fa", Corriere della Sera, August 20, 2017.
2. James Zug, "Stolen: How the Mona Lisa Became the World's Most Famous Painting", Smithsonian Magazine.
3. "The Theft That Made the 'Mona Lisa' a Masterpiece", NPR, July 30, 2011 (interview with James Zug and authors Dorothy and Tom Hoobler).
4. "Le vol de la Joconde", Paris-1900, which cites Le Petit Parisien and Le Gaulois of August 23, 1911 and Le Petit Parisien of January 5, 1914.
5. The issues cited in [4], available on Gallica, the digital library of the Bibliothèque nationale de France: Le Petit Parisien, August 23, 1911; Le Gaulois, August 23, 1911; Le Petit Parisien, January 5, 1914. The references are taken from [4].
6. "The Theft of The Mona Lisa As Told Through Our Newspapers", British Newspaper Archive, April 26, 2023, which cites Lloyd's Weekly Newspaper, Daily Mirror, Daily News, Ottawa Free Press and other newspapers from 1911 and 1913.
7. Simon Kuper, "Who Stole the Mona Lisa?", Financial Times, August 7, 2011, republished by Slate.
8. Douglas Sloan, "Mona Who?", The Isis, January 3, 2012.