The Theft of the Mona Lisa

Six days a week, for 115 years since her theft, more than 30,000 people a day push and shove to snap a photo or selfie with the Mona Lisa, and most have no idea why they even need to. 

On a hot Sunday, August 20, 1911, at around 4 pm. Vincenzo Peruggia entered the Musée du Louvre just like any other visitor. In the final moments, as the museum closed and guards ushered people out, Peruggia slipped into a storage closet between the Galerie d’Apollon and the Salon Carré. With a chunk of cheese, a small bottle of wine, and a baguette, he waited until the dark of night to emerge to begin the heist of the 20th century. 

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Bonjour, bonjour, and welcome to another new episode of Paris in Blue Blanc Rouge with Claudine Hemingway, and that is me. And I'm excited to bring a story to you this week, uh, one that I have spent many, many, many hours and days looking into and finding out more about this. And we already talked a little bit about her when we talked about her around her birthday. But this week, it was 115 years ago this week that the biggest theft that happened to the Louvre occurred. That is, until about 10 months ago. So keep that in mind as I'm telling you the story, because there's just a few things about the story that maybe sound a little familiar and how we really truly never learn from history, our history or our mistakes. So let's get into this. So it was six days a week in the 115 years since her theft that more than 30,000 people every single day push and shove to snap a photo or a selfie with the Mona Lisa, and most have no idea why they even need to do it. It was a hot Sunday on August 20th, 1911, and at around 4 p.m., Vincenzo Perugia entered the Muse del Louvre, just like any other visitor. It was in the final moments as the museum closed and guards ushered people out that Perugio slipped into a storage closet between the Gallery d'Apalon and the Salon Carret. He had a chunk of cheese, a small bottle of wine, and a baguette, and he waited until dark to emerge to begin the heist of the twentieth century. The portrait of a Florentine woman painted by a Renaissance master hung on the north wall of the Salon Carret. She had been placed within a new double frame with glass just weeks before by the man who was about to steal her. This was long before the days of cameras and alarm systems and one could easily hide in the Louvre overnight and wander around. How dreamy. The sun rose on Monday, august twenty first, and our thief prepared for his mistake. At seven thirty AM Perugia emerged from his hiding place in his white Louvre coat, walked past the wall his stolen loot once hung, a few steps through the grand gallery, and a quick turn into the Salle de Set Metre. On the right, a door still there today and heavily alarmed, hid a small staircase only used on Mondays. Through the door spinning down to the court of Sphinx, only to be met with a locked door. Using the screwdriver he brought to unleash our lovely lady from the tomb he created for her, he removed the doorknob, but it only made matters worse. It was August and Paris was quiet as the Parisians had fled to the coast and to the south. The remaining employees of the Louvre had just begun to move around for the day. Around eight AM and the plumber Jules Sauve heard knocking from a door as he walked by. With a wrench, Sauve opened the door and let the man out, who was about to become the most wanted thief in the world, along with the priceless painting. A quick bonjour and Merci and Pruggio walked out to the Corvis Conti with Mona under his arm. He tossed a doorknob into the Jardin de la Fant and jumped into a bus. The rest of that Monday within the Louvre was business as usual. Floors were cleaned and paintings and statues were dusted, and nobody noticed anything out of the ordinary. One of the greatest crimes of the twentieth century has happened and nobody noticed. On Tuesday, august twenty first, around nine thirty AM, the guards of the museum began to arrive and head to their posts. At the time, only former military and former police officers served as the guards in the Louvre, not so much these days. The brigadier Maximilian Alphonse Pauparin, a guard at the Salon Care, had served in the French military but had no idea what he was about to face till the morning of august twenty first, nineteen eleven. At ten AM, the Musee de Louvre opened its doors. There were no long lines of tourists waiting to get in, just a few loyal visitors and artists coming to wander the Grand Gallery. Artist Louis Beirude arrived just after the Louvre opened and carried his easel up the Escalier Darue, giving a little wink to the winged victory and to the Salon Carret. Beirude, a copyist, was commissioned to paint a portrait of a woman looking at what was about to become the most famous painting in the world. As he walked to the wall, he noticed a large hole between Titian's conjugal allegory and Carvaggio's mystic marriage, and below Vernese's wedding feast at Cana. In 1911, the paintings in the Saint Carre hung within inches of each other, on the wall much closer than they are now, so a large hole should have been pretty easy to spot. Beirux walked over to Poparin and asked where the portrait was. The burgadier scoffed and said it had to be in the photo studio as they had removed paintings all the time without alerting anyone and in the middle of the day. Without any sense of urgency, Poparin said he would head down and check. On the way he stopped for a very long cigarette break before popping in. In the photography workshop, tucked away deep in the basement, Poparin walked in and said, She's not here, they responded, but maybe she's been moved to another room. Poparin asked a few more people, then panic set in. It was noon on August twenty second, and the portrait of the Mona Lisa by Leonardo da Vinci had been gone for over twenty nine hours, and they just didn't know it yet. The doors of the gallery of the Louvre slammed shut and the few visitors in attendance were ushered out the door. The staff was told a water pipe had broken and there was no need to panic. Pope Rand, on the other hand, was experiencing a panic attack. At the time, the director of the Louvre, Jean Taville Omel, was on the Yucatan Peninsula on archaeological expedition. He left Georges Benedite, curator of the Egyptian department in charge. At twelve thirty PM, two and a half hours after the museum had opened, Benedite was beside himself and wondered why this had to happen on his watch. Phone calls ran through the switchboards, and to keep the incident on the QT, Benedite ran from the Louvre to the Palais de Justice on the Ile de la Cite. Out of breath, Benedite alerted the police of the unimaginable. Immediately, Louis Le Pine, head of the police, arrived at the now closed Louvre to investigate. The theft was kept very quiet, but the rumors began to spread. At the same time the police were told, a Louvre official sent a letter to the Beaux-Arts Museum in Comper, requesting that their copy of Mona Lisa be sent to Paris immediately. It was painted in the atelier of Leonardo by an unknown student. It is thought to be the best copy and the closest to the original portrait we have today. The Louvre thought they could just keep the theft quiet and also force the thief to make a mistake and make it easier to nab. The museum didn't send the painting and still has a letter in its archives. Lapine arrived at the door of the Louvre with dozens of police officers in tow. Passers by had to know that it was much more than a water leak. Investigators fanned out to every corner of the Louvre, which was smaller than it is today. When the two frames that had once held her were discovered in the stairwell, they knew the unimaginable did happen. The national gendarmes were alerted as well as the Minister of Culture and Interior, as well as the president of France Armand Foliere. The train stations were closed and the borders of France were alerted. However, none of those things would result in finding the Modelisa. One of the first to be questioned by the police was a very upset Maximilian Pouperin. About to have a nervous breakdown under the pressure, he was asked about the woman he saw every day. He said Mon Dieu. She was there Sunday night when the museum closed. In his years at his post, he saw many things. Lovelorn men brought her flowers and letters pledging their undying love to her, and one man was said to have even killed himself in front of her. I haven't found any info to back that up, but it does make for an interesting little addition. One young German man was so devoted to her that his story spread around the world. There is even rumors that she had her own mailbox of the Louvre still to this day. The police search high and low for more evidence. A partial print of the left hand was found on the casing of the frame, but at the time they had only been taking prints from the right hand, with little to go on. The Louvre thought she might be gone forever. In searching the Louvre and finding a newly created security frame discarded in the stairs that was used for only staff on Mondays, Lapine believed the thief had to have had knowledge of the Louvre and had work there. An interrogation of the staff was launched, and it was a plumber named Jules Sauve who gave the only clue they had to go on. Lapine brought Alphonse Barrion, who served as a chief of judicial identity and had been working on a new form of identifying people through fingerprints and profiling. The entire staff was called in and fingerprints of the right hand were taken, but one man didn't show up. Meanwhile, the last man to know of the theft was a Louvre director himself, Omel, who was deep in the Yucatan forest. Once asked if the Mona Lisa could be stolen, he laughed and said it would be like someone stealing the towers of Notre Dame. Impossible. He was on the first ship back to France. It was impossible to keep the news out of the press, and on the evening of august twenty second, the story appeared in Le Temp's newspaper, and from there it went around the world. To understand why this theft and specifically this painting captured the attention of the world, we have to understand what was happening at that moment in time. Today, the story would have spread online in a matter of seconds, and it did back then, in a way. This was a period known as the Belle Pac, the beautiful era. Since the end of the siege of Prussia and the Commune of 1871, Paris had fully grown into a new age. Every day, Paris had more than 35 daily journals that sold an astonishing two million copies every single day, and that was just in France. Newspapers and printing presses could now add photos and drawings, and with the expanded train travel as well as wire service, the news, even more importantly, images could spread quickly and across the ocean. In 1858, Luigi Calamata created the first copper engraving of the Mona Lisa, which was heralded as the best representation of the painting. It would be the image that spread around the world and why everyone suddenly knew the face of this mysterious woman from Florence. The Louvre closed its doors for a week while the investigation hit one dead end after another. The government called for an investigation of its own and how this could even happen. In an all too familiar scene played out exactly ten months ago, all parties involved began pointing fingers to each other. Security at the Musee de Louvre had been pretty laughable for quite some time. Reporters hid in the sarcophagus overnight to test the security and even stole small pieces to see if they could get away with it, and they did. One week later on Monday, August 28th, the search of the Louvre was finished and the museum would reopen the next day. It would also be the day the director Omel returned to the Louvre. On Tuesday, August 29th, 1911, at 10 AM, the Musee de Louvre opened its doors to thousands waiting in a two-hour line to enter for a glimpse of the wall where the Lady of the Louvre once hung. Surrounding the now empty wall were four policemen and six museum guards, as well as many undercover agents in the crowd, hoping the thief might make a return. Of the thousands of people who came, many brought notes and flowers to leave on the distinct parquet floor. Outside the doors, trinket sellers pedaled anything they could with their image on it, and even some entrepreneurial prostitutes hid in the shadows waiting for clients. Visitors were also greeted by two very angry dogs, Jacques and Millard, and a slew of security guards roaming the galleries. On August 31st, an emergency meeting was called between the ministers of interior and culture and Omel, who was removed from his position, and Pierre Eugene Poujolet was appointed as interim director, who had a background in security and police work. While the news of the theft spread around the world, poet and art critic Guillaume Apollinaire and Pablo Picasso read the headlines in the paper, just like everyone else. On September 5th, Apollinaire paid a visit to the Paris Journal to share that he may know who actually stole the Mona Lisa and turned in a few stolen objects that came from the Louvre. Confessing that a friend but using the fictional name Baron Ignacia Dormisson from time to time would steal small sculptures from the Louvre. Guillaume of Picasso benefited from his stolen loot and thought they would do the right thing and tell the authorities. The two friends were in a panic to rid themselves of these objects from the Louvre. At midnight of September 5th, the two men packed the pieces into a suitcase and worried they'd be captured riding in the metro or on a bus and walked from his studio in Montmartre to the Seine. Once there, they were afraid they'd be seen and decided to take a walk back up to Montmart with the heavy suitcase in tow. On September sixth, the front page of the Paris Journal broke, La Faire de Statuettes, which also alerted the police, who paid a visit to Apollinaire and brought him in for questioning. The thief's real name was Honore Joseph Garet Pierre Berjon, who also worked as a secretary to the writer. The same morning the police paid a visit to the Boulevard de Clichy in the apartment of Picasso. When questioned, he said he had never heard of Apollinaire and was released later that day. Apollinaire wasn't as lucky and was held for a week. It would be the only lead and arrest the French police had in the theft of the Mona Lisa, and it was a dead end. The incident would ruin the friendship of the artist and the writer and would be one of Picasso's few regrets in life. In february nineteen twelve, the spot had been left empty as a makeshift shrine until officials decided to move Raphael's Baldessar de Castiglione into its place. Close to the same size and more importantly, the subject was posed in much of the same way as Lisa. Raphael had briefly seen the painting while Leonardo worked on it. In January 1913, the updated catalogue of the Louvre was released and Leonardo's Mona Lisa wasn't even a part of the collection. The trail had run cold and the case had been closed. They believed she would never return home again. But what did happen to the Mona Lisa, you ask? Let's go back to the morning of August 21, 1911. Born on October 8, 1881, in Dumenza in northern Italy, Vincenzo Perugia was the oldest of five children and began working at 12 as a house painter in Milan. In 1908, Vincenzo moved to Paris, where he became very sick and hospitalized for lead poisoning, a nugget that will come into play later. Moving away from the painting business, he got a job with the Maison Gaubière Company that had worked on the glass and windows at the Musee de Louvre since 1832. In 1911, two paintings were slashed and the Louvre knew the most important pieces needed to be protected behind glass and new security frames. The Maison Gabier Company had been replacing windows in the Louvre and was tasked with the protection of the paintings. Made up of French workers and one Italian, Vincenzo Perugia. His French co-workers made fun of him and called him Maccaroni. Each day for a year, Perugia was up close and personal with each of the Italian paintings that had once belonged to the kings of France. After the Raphaels were completed, Vincenzo tackled the Leonardo da Vinci's and of course the Mona Lisa. This gave him an in-depth knowledge of the future star of the Louvre, although he hadn't decided to steal her quite yet. For days on end he worked in the Salon Care in the Grand Gallery, removing paintings from the wall as visitors filed past him, things that would never happen today. As the teasing from his coworkers increased, so did his anger. Vincenzo believed that everything in the Louvre had been stolen by Napoleon from Italy. It had been close to one hundred years since that was rectified. Listen to episode twenty-eight for more about that. Perugia had an idea, and he was going to take a painting back to where it belonged, his native Italy. On those long days, he overheard a lot of people talking about a painting that today nobody lines up for and pushes to get a selfie with, but does hang on the wall opposite the Da Vinci's. Andrea Montagna's Mars and Venus was painted in 1496 for Isabel Deste. It entered the Lou's collection through Cardinal Richelieu, not Napoleon. The painting is six by five feet and some change, and had it been stolen, he most likely would not have gotten very far. Perugio realized that the Mona Lisa was a safer bet. It was smaller, he knew how to remove it from the frame, and she was a Da Vinci after all. On the morning of August 21st, with the Mona Lisa measuring 2.6 feet by 3.3 feet in tow, he jumped on a bus and headed home. Vincenzo stayed in his small top floor apartment at number five Rue de Hôpital Saint Louis overnight and into the next day. On the morning of August 22nd, when it was discovered she was gone, Vincenzo stayed home with the grand lady in the closet. When the entire staff of the Louvre was called to be interviewed and fingerprinted, Vincenzo did not show up. The police and Lapine arrived at a small apartment to question the thief, who led him in and slowly answered his inquiry. Meanwhile, the Mona Lisa was turned around and propped up in his closet. Lapine never looked around and left without a bit of suspicion. Worried he would return, Pruggio left his apartment with Lisa in a case and checked into the hotel Reve Gauche on Rue Saint Per in Saint Germain, and requested a top floor room in case he needed to make a quick escape on the rooftops. Hiding away in room 603 for three days, he waited for any news of the theft to spread through Paris. Today is the Hotel da Vinci, and you could stay in the room where Vincenzo and his Florentine lady once stayed, with your own copy of Lisa hanging on the wall. On Wednesday, August 23rd, the headline was international news, but not even a whisper of a suspect. Puggio felt that he was in the clear and returned to his tiny apartment on Rue de Hopita Saint Louis, where the Mona Lisa had stayed and would remain for the next twenty eight months. For two years, the Mona Lisa returned to her earlier days of existence, stuffed into a closet without the adoration of thousands of people, although at the time it was a tiny apartment near the Canal Saint-Martin. In the winter of 1912, Perugio left Lisa in his apartment, but now in a box that he slid under his stove. A quick trip to London to see art dealer Joseph Devine, who is hailed as the individual to broker more European art to wealthy Americans than anyone else. When the short five foot three Vincenzo walked in, Devine immediately laughed him out of the gallery. Perugio returned to Paris and to Lisa in her tomb under the stove and waited another year before his final act. For all of 1912 and into 1913, Vincenzo went on with his life, although he did not return to his job and he stayed quiet and close to home while the world wondered where Mona Lisa was. On November 29th, 1913, Vincenzo once again appeared, this time in a letter sent to Alfredo Geri, an antique dealer in Florence. It stated that, quote, stolen work of Leonardo's is in my possession. It seems to belong to Italy, as the painter was an Italian. My dream is to give back this masterpiece to the land from which it came. Signed Leonard. Leonard. Jerry was skeptical at best, but contacted Giovanni Poggi, curator and Corado Ricci, director of the fine arts of the Iffizi. Deciding they didn't have anything to lose, Jerry responded and set up a meeting for December 22nd in Milan. Leonard decided he didn't want to wait any longer and arrived in Florence on Wednesday, December 12, 1913. Walking into Jerry's shop on the Via Borgo Orgnesati, Leonardo Vincenzo introduced himself and asked the owner if he was interested in seeing this painting. Two hours later, Gerry and Poggy were in Pruggio's tiny hotel room on the third floor of the Albergo Tripoli Italia when they turned the painting over and saw the Louvre's inventory code. MR 316. They knew they were looking at what was now the most famous painting in the world. The thief brought her back to Italy in a large custom made crate with a false bottom topped with clothes, tools, and a mandolin. The director was shocked to see what was lying on top of her. Vincenzo said he wanted 500,000 lira for her. Today that is worth $2.2 million. The two agreed and let the thief know they wanted to have it checked at the offici before they paid. As the three men walked out of the hotel, a front desk staff member stopped them. The clerk thought they were stealing a painting from the hotel room. It had much tighter security than the entire Louvre. As soon as the painting was verified, Jerry and Poggy told Perugio to go back to the hotel and they would bring the money over. Vincenzo must have walked back to the hotel lighter than air, thinking all his dreams were about to come true. Instead, the police were called and arrived as Vincenzo lay down to nap and was quickly arrested. I mean, spoiler alert, of course you know that she came back because you hear about her pretty much every day of the year in some way or another. But there is more to the story, and I'll tell you more when we get into December, January about the Mona Lisa. But it is a fascinating subject. I wanted to know more about her so many years ago. I just looked into the theft, and that put me down the rabbit hole of everything, Mona Lisa. And it really is pretty fascinating, the story of the painting and also where she has been. She's also been on vacation a few times, other than the time that she went, she was stolen and lived under an oven and then off to Italy. But I'll share more of that with you soon. So, but make sure to check out my website, ClaudineHemingway.com. I'll put some pictures and even a picture of Vincenzo on my website. And there were some really neat drawings that were done of kind of his escape and imagine what it was like. But make sure you check that out. And also, I was this morning I went over to Notre Dame and made a video on an update because there's been a few things going on over there as far as the restoration. And now they've actually entered into two parts of the project that are probably the most technical and hardest of the entire project, going from the fire until today. So definitely go and check that out. You can find that on my YouTube or I'll have a link as well on my Instagram. And if you are on Substack, and even if you're not, you can sign up for my new newsletter. I'm gonna eventually, beginning at the start of September, move my old newsletter that I've had since 2020 over to Substack. And with that, I'm going to be able to share some longer updates. Sometimes there's things I post on Instagram and social media that I actually run out of space. I can't write anymore because it has a character limit. And so I am going to use my Substack for that, as well as being able to post videos and things that I see with a little bit more information than you could just do on social media. So you could find me on Substack as Claudine Hemingway as well. And that's with 1 M H E M I N G W A Y. But until then, until next week, make sure you you could turn tune into all of these things that I'm doing and check my YouTube. And I'm also going to make a video this week about the theft of the Mona Lisa and take you into the Louvre and show you a few things. So make sure you check that out and subscribe and share this with anybody that needs to know more about the Mona Lisa or any of these fantastic historical happenings of Paris. So until then, until next week, I will see you soon. Amiento and merci beaucoup.

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Bye.