Four Pegs on the Wall

The Monday Morning Glazier

Eli: Monday morning, August 21st, 1911, at the Louvre in Paris. A man in one of the white smocks the museum's workers wear walks into the Salon Carré, the grand gallery where the Louvre hangs its very best. He lifts a portrait off the wall. Then he walks out of the building with it hidden under his clothes. By his own account, he looked just like the rest of the staff. His name is Vincenzo Peruggia. The painting is Leonardo's Mona Lisa.

Mara: And earlier that same morning, around seven, the maintenance chief, a man named Picquet, had walked two co-workers through that very room and pointed her out. As a British newspaper reported it, he told them, "It is the most valuable painting in the whole world, and is worth millions."

Eli: Which is where the listener's question comes in. They'd heard the Mona Lisa only became famous after someone stole it. Is that true? Today's angle is the patriotic thief whose mistaken heist created the world's most famous portrait.

Mara: To get there, we follow Peruggia out of that gallery, through two years of searching, and into a hotel in Florence. He meant to bring her home to Italy and be celebrated for it. Whether he ever is stays open.

The Masterpiece Nobody Queued For

Eli: Peruggia knew that building. He was a glazier, and he'd worked at the Louvre. On a staircase he stopped and left two things behind: the painting's protective glass, and its frame, carved wood in the Renaissance style, given by a countess only a few years before. Then came a locked exit door. A workman, a plumber, turned up at the bottom of the stairwell and helped him get it open, with no idea what was walking out past him.

Mara: And what walked out had centuries of praise behind it. In 1550, Giorgio Vasari wrote that it was painted in a way to make any worthy artist tremble and fear. In 1869, Walter Pater is quoted writing, "She is older than the rocks among which she sits." A Guardian writer says Pater's prose broadcast her strange allure to hundreds of thousands. So when Picquet called her the museum's most valuable artwork, he had a long line of critics standing behind him.

Eli: Mara, the other reading runs through the historian James Zug. By his account, the painting wasn't widely hailed as a masterpiece until the mid-nineteenth century, more than three centuries after Leonardo painted it. And a Euronews piece says that for all its standing among France's leaders, it didn't have the same recognition among ordinary gallery visitors. Prized at the top, then. Not yet a crowd-puller.

Mara: Though in 1910, Ladies' Home Journal called it "the most famous portrait in the world."

Eli: So the two readings split over one thing: famous to whom.

Mara: And on that Monday, the first test of who was really looking was a stretch of wall in the Salon Carré with four bare iron pegs on it.

The Empty Hooks and the Avant-Garde

Eli: Tuesday morning, the 22nd. An artist sets up an easel in the Salon Carré, looks at the wall, and asks a guard why the Mona Lisa isn't there. Nobody panics. The guards assume she's gone to be photographed, carried off to the museum's photography studio, the in-house room where works were routinely taken to be documented. Only when the inquiries come back empty does it land. The director is away on vacation, so the news climbs to the acting head: "Elle est partie!" She's gone. By then she'd been missing for more than a day.

Mara: Then everything slammed shut at once. The Louvre closed. Police questioned the staff, re-enacted the crime, and dusted for fingerprints, which was still a new technique back then. The French border was sealed, and departing ships and trains were searched.

Eli: And the strangest catch had nothing to do with her. A little over a week after the theft, a man walks into a newspaper office holding a small statue he says he stole from the Louvre, one of several, four years earlier. Suspicion falls on the poet Guillaume Apollinaire, who's arrested. Under pressure, he admits the man had sold stolen pieces to none other than Pablo Picasso. The police think they've found a crime ring behind the Mona Lisa. So they haul Picasso, twenty-nine years old, in front of a magistrate. He was terrified.

Mara: And neither man had anything to do with the Mona Lisa.

Eli: So the dragnet ended with a poet in a cell, Mara, a painter badly shaken, and no painting. Wherever Peruggia had taken her, and whatever he meant to do with her, the search hadn't reached him.

The Trunk by the Bed

Mara: When the Louvre reopened, people came for the wall. Thousands lined up to look at the bare space in the Salon Carré. Call it the empty-wall spectacle: a crowd paying its respects to an absence, the way people stand at a grave. Some left bouquets of flowers beneath it. Those who say the theft made her famous point to this: it's often said more people came to see the gap than had come to see the painting. One French paper said, with a touch of irony, that she was "more visible than ever" precisely because she couldn't be seen.

Eli: Pater wrote for readers. This was a queue for four hooks.

Mara: And French police had printed sixty-five hundred photographs of her for the streets of Paris.

Eli: All those copies on the street, and the original was in his room. Peruggia had taken her home, and by one account kept her in the false bottom of a white wooden suitcase under his bed, for more than two years. And he always had his reason ready. His only motive, he insisted, was to return her to Italy in glory, and to avenge Napoleon's massive theft of artworks all across Europe.

Mara: Under a bed, while thousands queued for the space she'd left.

Eli: And the patriot story has a crack in it. On December 22nd, 1911, four months after the theft, he wrote that Paris was where he would make his fortune, and that it would arrive in one shot. Written by a man who said he'd done it all for Italy.

Mara: Which one drove him, Italy or the fortune, still isn't settled. What closed in on him either way was the fame. With her face in every paper, it's hard to see how he could sell her, or quietly hand her over, without being spotted at once. The same crowds that turned a blank wall into a shrine had made his prize almost impossible to move. And sooner or later, he'd have to move it.

The Florence Trap

Eli: November 1913. An art dealer in Florence, Alfredo Geri, gets a letter signed "Leonardo." It says "the painting was in his hands," and asks 500,000 lire for its return to Italy. In December, Geri meets him in a hotel room in Florence. Leonardo opens a trunk. Inside are tools, broken shoes, a mandolin. And the Mona Lisa.

Mara: Some twenty-eight months after she left the Louvre.

Eli: Geri plays along. He brings in the director of the Uffizi Gallery to check the panel on the spot: the fine web of cracks in the paint, and the authentication stamp, the Louvre's official seal and inventory marking that says this one is theirs. By Geri's account, the man coolly told them he was sure it was genuine, because he'd taken it from the Louvre himself. Satisfied, they turn him over to the police, and he's arrested at his hotel, on December 12th or 13th, depending on the account.

Mara: So the homecoming he'd planned ends under arrest, in Italy.

Eli: And the man they arrested was a glazier: a tradesman paid to fit glass panes, and the protective cases paintings sit behind.

Mara: So the Louvre had employed him to keep its treasures behind glass.

Eli: Exactly. Which is how he knew the building well enough to leave with one.

Mara: And then his reason falls apart. Peruggia said Napoleon had stolen her. But Leonardo himself took the painting to France, around 1516, when he went to work for King Francis I. A royal receipt dated 1518 records it entering the French royal collection, in a deal handled by Leonardo's apprentice, Salai; other accounts put the king's purchase after Leonardo's death. Either way, that's some 250 years before Napoleon was even born. She had never been part of the Napoleonic plunder. Picquet's most valuable painting in the world had been legally France's for four centuries.

Eli: So, Mara, the patriot had avenged a theft that never happened, and now Florence had the painting and the man, both at once.

The Return of the Icon

Mara: And Florence wanted to see her before Paris got her back.

Eli: On December 15th, 1913, the New York Times ran the headline "Florentines in riot over 'Mona Lisa'." A crowd of thirty thousand, a small town's worth of people, swept the police aside in a rush to see her. She went on show in Florence, then in other Italian cities, under banner headlines celebrating her return. Joe Medeiros, who researched the case, says people who couldn't get in ended up rioting.

Mara: Cheered into Italy almost four hundred years after Leonardo carried her out.

Eli: Peruggia's own day came in June 1914, at his trial in Florence, over two days. The sentence was a year and fifteen days. On appeal, he served about seven months. As Medeiros puts it, it was a crime, and he was put in prison.

Mara: Seven months, for what Picquet called the museum's most valuable artwork. And by the trial, she'd long been home. On January 4th, 1914, after two years of her face in the papers, she went back onto her old wall in the Salon Carré. Over the next two days, more than a hundred thousand people filed past, enough to fill a big stadium. As the writer R. A. Scotti puts it, "Mona Lisa left the Louvre a work of art." And then: "She returned an icon."

Eli: Two years earlier, people had been queuing for the empty hooks.

Mara: So the claim the listener heard is partly true. The Mona Lisa didn't come out of nowhere: from Vasari to the Louvre's own maintenance chief, the people who knew art already called it a masterpiece. What the theft, the hunt and the return made was a cultural icon, a face recognized at a glance by people who've never set foot in a museum. One standard account says the worldwide coverage led to a massive increase in public recognition. The Louvre itself says her fame was all the greater, and today calls her the world's most famous painting.

Eli: Through the twentieth century, she was claimed to turn up in hundreds of paintings. And a couple of thousand ads.

Mara: Back to that Monday morning, then: a man in a white smock lifts a portrait off the wall, meaning to take a painting home to Italy. He never managed that. What went back up on the same wall, two years and four months later, was a face the whole world had been staring at in the newspapers.

Eli: Two things are still open. Whether Peruggia acted out of patriotism, greed, or both, the archival records leave unsettled. And historians still dispute whether twentieth-century mass tourism would have made her a star anyway, theft or no theft. A document that pinned down his motive, or a strong case on that second argument, would change how the story of her fame gets told.

Mara: For listeners wanting to explore further, look into Vincenzo Peruggia.

Eli: Follow culture with us, as masterworks continue to cross borders and spark national passions.

Mara: Thanks for listening. I'm Mara.

Eli: And I'm Eli. Until next time.