Vincenzo Peruggia

Pietro Vincenzo Antonio Peruggia was born on 8 October 1881 in Dumenza, a small village in the Alps of Italy near the border with Switzerland to Celeste Rossi and Giacomo Peruggia. For a brief period after having moved to Paris in 1908, Peruggia obtained work at the Louvre, cleaning and reframing paintings. His job also required him to construct strong cases for some of the artwork in the museum, including the one for the Mona Lisa by Leonardo da Vinci; he was likely involved in Mona Lisa's box frame construction and would have known how to open it in minutes. After the painting was stolen, a curator investigated the matter and listed all the names involved, including Peruggia's. There was not much security at the Louvre, and its entry was free.

In 1911, Peruggia perpetrated what has been described as the greatest art theft of the 20th century. According to Peruggia's later interrogation in Florence, following his arrest on 12 December 1913, he said that he entered the Louvre on Monday, 21 August 1911, at around 7 am, through the door where the other Louvre workers were entering, wearing one of the white smocks that museum employees customarily wore, making himself indistinguishable from the other workers. It was a quiet morning, and the Louvre was nearly empty, because 21 August was the weekly closure day during the summer holidays.

When the Salon Carré, where the Mona Lisa hung, was empty, Peruggia lifted the painting off the four iron pegs that secured it to the wall between Antonio da Correggio's Mystical Marriage and Titian's Allegory of Alfonso d'Avalos and took it to a nearby service stairway of the Sept Mètres. There, he removed the protective case and frame, hiding the discarded elements behind some student artworks stored on the staircase landing. Some people report that he concealed the painting (which Leonardo da Vinci painted on wood) under his smock that was larger than him; however, Peruggia was only 160 centimetres (63 in) tall, and the Mona Lisa measures approximately 53 cm × 77 cm (21 in × 30 in), so it would not fit under a smock worn by someone of his size. Instead, he used a service door. A plumber, thinking he was an employee (Peruggia had finished working for the Louvre), unlocked the door for him, and Peruggia successfully left the museum. He then hid the painting in his apartment in Paris. The theft was not discovered until the following day, when a painter who was about to do a copy of the Mona Lisa found it missing. The director, who was on holiday, had boasted "steal the Mona Lisa? That would be like thinking that someone could steal the towers of Notre Dame cathedral." The arts minister was also away, having ordered "don't call me unless the Louvre burns down or the Joconde is stolen" (La Joconde is the French name of the Mona Lisa). …

Peruggia was released from jail after a short time and served in the Italian army during World War I. During the war, he was captured by Austria-Hungary and held as a prisoner of war for two years until the war ended and he was released. He later married Annunciata Rossi, had one daughter named Celestina (1924–2011), returned to France, and continued to work as a painter decorator using his birth name Pietro Peruggia. He died from a heart attack on 8 October 1925 (his 44th birthday) in the Paris suburb of Saint-Maur-des-Fossés. He was buried in the Condé Cemetery of Saint-Maur-des-Fossés. Sometime in the 1950s, Peruggia's remains were exhumed and relocated into the cemetery bonelocker. His death in 1925 was not widely reported by the media at the time, possibly because he died under the name of Pietro Peruggia; obituaries appeared mistakenly only when another Vincenzo Peruggia died in Haute-Savoie in 1947.

Peruggia's theft is part of popular culture, and over the years it has been celebrated in books, films, and songs including "Mona Lisa" written in 1978 by Ivan Graziani. In Der Raub der Mona Lisa (1931), an early German sound film, Peruggia was portrayed by Willi Forst.

In an April 1956 episode of the TV show You Are There, called "The Recovery of the Mona Lisa (December 10, 1913)", Peruggia is played by Vito Scotti, who reprised the role in another TV reconstruction of the famous theft, this time for the TV-show GE True. The episode was called "The Tenth Mona Lisa" and aired in March 1963. Liana Bortolon's book The Life and Times of Leonardo also mentioned the theft.

George Chakiris played Peruggia in The Mona Lisa Has Been Stolen (1966).

In The Man Who Stole La Gioconda (it) (2006), a television miniseries, Peruggia was portrayed by Alessandro Preziosi.

In March 2012, Peruggia's mugshot was sold for €3,825 to an Italian buyer by the Parisian auction house Tajan. The small original silver gelatin print (123 x 54 mm) had been estimated by photography expert Jean-Mathieu Martini at between €1,500 and €1,800, excluding fees. The mugshot was taken in 1909 by Alphonse Bertillon, the inventor of the anthropometry system. In the summer of 2012, Peruggia's character was the hero of a play that depicted him as a patriot. The play was performed in his hometown of Dumenza, Lombardy. In a 2018 episode of Drunk History on Comedy Central, he was portrayed by Jack Black. In a 2023 episode of Murdoch Mysteries called "Murdoch and the Mona Lisa", he was portrayed by Johnathan Sousa. In the 2024 Summer Olympics opening ceremony, the theft is referenced by the Minions when they stole the Mona Lisa painting from its protective chamber.