The Day the Mona Lisa Vanished
Next: August 21, 2027
An empty wall made her famous.
The story
Where it comes from
This Story marks the anniversary of Monday 21 August 1911, when the Mona Lisa disappeared from the Louvre in Paris. The museum was closed that day, and the few guards who noticed the empty space assumed the painting had been taken away to be photographed. The thief was Vincenzo Peruggia, an Italian handyman who had once worked at the Louvre and had even helped build the painting's protective frame. He carried it out and kept it hidden in a trunk with a false bottom in his room in Paris for more than two years.
How it's celebrated
There is no formal observance. Anyone can mark the day by looking closely at Leonardo da Vinci's portrait, in person at the Louvre or online, and thinking about how a picture that in 1911 was just another painting on the wall, hung on four metal hooks, became the most famous painting in the world.
Did you know
- Once the theft was discovered the next day, the Louvre was shut for a week, and crowds laid flowers at its gates as if someone had died.
- Police handed out 6,500 flyers showing the painting, and both the poet Guillaume Apollinaire and the painter Pablo Picasso were questioned.
- The painting was recovered in Florence in December 1913, after Peruggia offered it to the art dealer Alfredo Geri, and it was back in the Louvre by the end of that month.
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