A hundred years ago, on 21 August 1911, an Italian painter and decorator slipped from the cupboard in the Louvre where he had been hiding all night, stepped up to the Mona Lisa, freed her from her frame and left the building apparently unseen. It was 24 hours before anyone noticed she was missing. The usual line is that the Louvre was closed for maintenance and everyone thought that somebody else must have removed the picture to be photographed, or cleaned. But museums are – or were – surprisingly blind to crime, even when it involves stealing the world's most famous painting. Or perhaps not the world's most famous painting – the Mona Lisa certainly wasn't universally known in 1911. You still had to travel to the Louvre to see her. There were prints, though Leonardo's cumulative portrait, gradually painted over several years, had long proved extremely hard to copy as an engraving. And photographs did exist – indeed the French police printed off 6,500 copies for distribution in the streets of Paris immediately after her disappearance, as if to jog someone's memory. These mug-shots were also for comparison with any forgery that might turn up purporting to be the original. For the Mona Lisa wears a fine veil of craquelure – that pattern of tiny cracks that can form in the surface of a painting when it's as old as she is – that is more or less impossible to fake. Wrinkles are her positive ID. But a century ago, the painting's fame was restricted to the west, where she had been buoyed up on clouds of romantic hype ever since Walter Pater wrote in 1869: "She is older than the rocks among which she sits, like the vampire she has been dead many times . . ." which although not exactly gallant, broadcast her strange allure to hundreds of thousands.
A picture that could still come as something of a surprise: unthinkable now, but in those days reproductions of the Mona Lisa had only fairly recently become popular. What really put a face to the name was the press coverage inspired by the theft. Every major newspaper in Europe covered the story, and every story was illustrated with a reproduction of the painting. One paper, France's l'Illustration, even produced a centrespread, peddling the story that Leonardo had been in love with his sitter, and promising to work towards a colour reproduction within a couple of weeks. Millions of people who might not have seen it, might never even have heard of it, soon became experts on Leonardo's stolen painting.
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One of the first suspects was Pablo Picasso. The painter had nothing to do with the crime but immediately tried to dispose of some statues that turned out to have been stolen from the same museum. The poet Guillaume Apollinaire was also brought in for questioning. No charges were brought, though suspicion followed Picasso for a while – surely a great painter would want a great painting, ran the theory. For almost two years the trail went cold.
The painting was in Switzerland or Argentina. Or it was in a cold-water flat in the Bronx or a secret room in the mansion of JP Morgan. In fact it never left Paris, or not until the thief, Vincenzo Perruggia, went to Florence in December 1913 after contacting a Florentine dealer called Alfred Geri, who he hoped would help him dispose of this unsaleable hostage for cash. Geri played along, even bringing the director of the Uffizi to the meeting at the Albergo Tripoli-Italian (needless to say swiftly renamed the Hotel La Gioconda). The painting was removed from its false-bottomed trunk. The craquelure was identified, and Geri promptly called the police.
What did Perruggia feel about the eerie, enigmatic, supercilious, exquisite, remote, satanic (call her what you will) Mona Lisa that he would have her more or less about his person for two long years?
To begin with he kept her in a cupboard, then under a stove in the kitchen, and finally in the false-bottomed trunk. For a while, he rather cockily propped her postcard on the mantelpiece, and in the letter to Geri he signs himself Leonardo Vincenzo. But fairly soon he seems to have found her hard to look at, impossible to live with; there is evidence of repeated attempts to sell her.
The object Perruggia stole is painted on a rectangle of poplar wood only 77cm high – "not even the size of the new TV screens!" was the notorious objection of Americans in the 1950s. I find that reaction strange, having the opposite feeling – that the actual painting is much bigger than I ever expect. Perhaps that's because the Mona Lisa is scaled in one's mind to the size of an infinite number of postcards and reproductions. In reality, set in concrete, behind triple layers of bulletproof glass, she seems as large as any incarcerated offender.
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How the Mona Lisa looked in 1911 we shall never know. Nowadays, her photograph, her fame, precedes her so that every sighting is inflected: does she match up, does she look different, how does she compare with our expectations? The jo