The Most Infamous Art Theft Ever
A Review by Dr. Jerry Flack
Nicholas Day received the prestigious 2024 Sibert Medal from the American Library Association for the best informational book for youth published in 2023. Day skillfully weaves together an amazing number of related stories in The Mona Lisa Vanishes. He expertly brings together a biography of Leonardo da Vinci, histories of the fifteenth, sixteenth, and early twentieth centuries, the glory of Paris and the Louvre Museum, the birth of forensic science in police work, an extensive chronicle of the 1911 theft and the 1913 recovery of the Mona Lisa, plus the origination of the world’s first instant superstar.
Early on, author Day accentuates the magnitude of the intriguing story he shares. “The theft of the Mona Lisa was the greatest heist in art history.” Prior to the shocking theft of da Vinci’s phenomenal portrait, Theophile Homolle, the director of the Louvre Museum scoffed at questions about the security of the Mona Lisa (titled La Joconde in France). He argued that La Joconde would be no more easy to steal than one of the great towers of the Notre Dame Cathedral. Day suggests that the idea of the theft of the Louvre treasure today would seem as incredible as the theft of the Washington Monument or Niagara Falls. Still, in 1911, Leonardo da Vinci’s masterpiece was taken from her rightful place in France’s greatest museum and remained missing for well over two years.
Paris was a remarkable city in 1911. In the early years of the twentieth century everything seemed to be changing. Parisians could see airplanes, automobiles, listen to radio and watch movies, and enjoy the benefits of electricity. Paris did, indeed, become the City of Light. Literacy was growing because more people went to school and new jobs required reading skills. The phenomenal growth of literacy brought about the arrival of newspapers that became immensely popular. The Le Petit Parisien had the largest circulation of any newspaper in the world. Readers loved sensational stories even if they were fictional. A young Spanish painter, Pablo Picasso, was changing the whole way people in Paris viewed art and Albert Einstein was impacting the way scientists understood time and space.
The role of the police was changing as well. They no longer existed just to hold prisoners in jails. Enlightened police were beginning to refer to their work as forensic science. They sought to solve crimes. Even so, the French police badly bungled their investigation into the theft of the Mona Lisa. Among many failures, the Paris police and its influential chief, Louis Lepine, ignored the success that England and the United States criminal investigators were having with the study of fingerprinting. Had French detectives used this relatively new detection tool, they most likely would have found the art thief very early on.
For several centuries the home of the Mona Lisa was the Louvre Museum that was nearly a thousand years old in 1911. It was originally built as a military fortress in 1191, but later became the palace of French royalty. Following the French Revolution, the Louvre became the greatest museum of the French Republic. It is an enormous structure. Author Day compares it to the Eiffel Tower. If the Louvre and the Eiffel Tower were laid down, side by side, they would be equal in magnitude. The Louvre is so enormous that adequate security was impossible to maintain. Only a few guards were responsible for too many rooms to count.
In 1911, museum visits were slight. The most frequent visitors were copyists. Copyists spent great amounts of time making exact copies of the museum’s great paintings. They were recognized by the museum guards and were allowed to come and go as they pleased. Many kept their white smocks, canvases, and painting supplies in cupboards and small rooms throughout the museum. The curators of the Louvre were aware of the value of the Mona Lisa. The small painting was on display in a large salon that showcased great works of art from the Italian Renaissance. However, most French citizens were unfamiliar with the Mona Lisa or even what she looked like. Ironically, her theft made her the world’s first instant superstar.
In August of 1911, the Louvre Museum was in the lengthy process of photographing every object it owned. When a copyist first notified a museum guard that the Mona Lisa was missing from her usual placement, the guard dismissed her disappearance as being the work of photographers. But, further searches among photographers revealed that they did not have the priceless painting. Ultimately, the French police and museum officials had to admit to the public that Leonardo’s masterpiece was nowhere to be found in the Louvre.
Newspaper stories exclaimed her absence to the world. Reproductions of the famed painting were on the front pages of the sensational press. Postcards of the Mona Lisa were to be found everywhere. The police and the lay public all had theories as to where the famed painting might be held. Massive searches were conducted of public transportation such as ships leaving France and trains that crisscrossed the nation. Rich Americans were suspect. Even nations such as Germany were accused of having stolen the painting. The young painter, Pablo Picasso, was questioned by the police. He had a perfect alibi. He was in the Pyrenees Mountains at the time of the theft, judged to have occurred on Monday, August 21, 1911.
The great paintings of the Louvre in 1911 were framed and covered with glass to protect them from harm. The combined weight of the frame and glass was far too heavy for a thief to carry the Mona Lisa from the museum. Moreover, the portrait is painted on three poplar tree boards so it could not be rolled up with ease such as a painting on canvas. Having once worked at the Louvre, the thief knew he could not leave the museum with the painting as it had been displayed, framed and covered with glass. In removing the painting from the wooden frame and glass, he left a perfect thumb print on the glass. However, notorious art thieves whose fingerprints were on file all possessed perfect alibis. They were in jail when the heist occurred.
By 1913, the Mona Lisa was thought to be gone forever. The portrait was no longer even listed in the Louvre catalog. The official investigation was closed. Meanwhile, in Florence, Italy, a prominent art dealer, Alfredo Geri, received an unusual letter from a man known only as “Leonard.” He claimed to possess the missing masterpiece. Geri invited Giovanni Poggi, the director of Florence’s great Uffizi Art Museum, to meet with the letter writer and to accompany him to see the painting “Leonard” promised. An expansive investigation followed with a single and unbelievable conclusion. The Mona Lisa had been found. She was known in Italy as La Gioconda. The thief, Vincenzo Perugia, was not an internationally famous art thief. He was a humble man of Italian birth who had once worked for a short time as a glassworker at the Louvre. He had framed the Mona Lisa in early January of 1911. Perugia was a poor man who believed that Napoleon had stolen La Gioconda from Leonardo’s birth nation. He believed that he was an Italian patriotic hero who was restoring the painting to its true home. He did not know that the French King, Francis I, was the final patron of Leonardo and had purchased the painting in France shortly after the death of da Vinci in his court in 1519. The painting that Leonardo carried with him during all the years of his later life did not belong to Italy. It was a possession of the French Republic and the Louvre Museum. Many Italians believed that famous portrait should remain in Italy, but the painting was returned to its rightful owners.
When La Joconde was secretly delivered back to France, attendance at the Louvre Museum was no longer scarce. More than two years after her disappearance, the French public clamored to view the Mona Lisa. Leonardo’s painting of the lovely woman with the unusual smile remains the most famous and highly valued painting in the world.
Author Nicholas Day unfolds with high drama the theft and eventual recovery of the Mona Lisa. He also presents a fascinating biographical profile of Leonardo da Vinci, the ultimate Renaissance Man. Along the way he likewise explores the Italian Renaissance, the evolution of police forensic science, the excitement of the early years of the twentieth century, and even what little is known of the two most famous women in Leonardo’s life, his mother, Caterina di Meo Lippi, and the subject of his famed portrait, Lisa Gherardini.
The Mona Lisa Vanishes is history that reads very much like a mystery thriller; it is a quick page turner. Along the way there are fascinating insights into the creation of the painting, a time in the history of the portrait when it was not considered one of the Louvre’s great treasures, and why the Mona Lisa became the international sensation that she remains today well over a century after her intriguing theft and her miraculous recovery. Brett Helquist’s black-and-white drawings are often humorous and add fine visual complements to Day’s highly enjoyable tale. Both the author and illustrator are not afraid to occasionally find humor and surprise to one of the most fascinating stories in the history of the world of art. The history is rich in end matter, including a mighty treasury of sources and a thorough index.
Home & School Activities
Visiting the Louvre. The Louvre Museum has been the home to the Mona Lisa since 1797. It is the largest and greatest art museum in the world. Ten million people visit The Louvre annually. Its size is astonishing. The museum owns 460,000 art artifacts that span at least nine thousand years and represent treasures from major cultures around the globe. One of the Museum’s extraordinary features is the massive glass pyramid with fountains designed and built by the Chinese-American architect I. M. Pei and opened to the public in 1989. Encourage students to research the museum and its phenomenal history in both books and online. Student researchers can enjoy live visits to the Louvre via YouTube. They can also consult print resources such as James Gardner’s insightful book, The Louvre: The Many Lives of the World’s Most Famous Museum (Atlantic Monthly Press, 2020). Ask students to compile a list of ten extraordinary facts about the Louvre Museum and then create a verbal and visual chapter about the museum for an imagined travel guidebook to Paris.
Saving The Mona Lisa. The world’s most famous painting has been threatened with theft and damage on several occasions. She survived Napoleon and the French Revolution. Despite Vincenzo Perugia’s mistaken beliefs about the ownership and provenance of the portrait he called La Gioconda, he took great pains to protect Leonardo da Vinci’s masterpiece during the more than two years he cared for the portrait.
Perhaps the greatest threat to the Mona Lisa was the failed attempt of the Nazi Army to steal the painting when they invaded and then occupied France for most of the duration of World War II. One of Adolf Hitler’s grandest ambitions in his crazed mind was that after he had won the war, Germany would create the largest and greatest art museum the world would ever know. The Nazis looted the most valuable works of art of all the European nations that they invaded. French Resistance leaders moved Leonardo’s masterpiece at least six different times to protect her. Robert M. Edsel’s Rescuing Da Vinci (Laurel Publishing, 2006) is a “coffee table” book that has an apt, if long, subtitle: Hitler and the Nazis Stole Europe’s Great Art – America and Her Allies Recovered It. Edsel penned the screenplay with George Clooney who co-wrote, starred in, and directed the movie The Monuments Men (Columbia Pictures, 2014) that tells the extraordinary story of heroes who thwarted attempts to steal the Mona Lisa by the Nazis during World War II.
Encourage readers to search the Internet for more stories about the rescue of the Mona Lisa during World War II. Then, using the reporters’ five Ws – who, what, where, when, and why – write a newspaper or magazine article for the Saturday Evening Post that might have appeared in 1946 or 1947.
Who Was Leonardo? In the year 2000, many historians named Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519) as the greatest genius in the previous millennium (1,000 years). At an early age, Leonardo was an apprentice to the Florentine artist, Andrea del Verroccoi. Even while working as an apprentice, he developed his own style of art that came to be known as fumo (or smoke). Essentially, it is a manner of painting that hides the act of painting. There are no outlines or edges; nothing shows the beginning or ending of a painting.
Despite his genius as an artist, Leonardo did not want to be a painter. His projects were to measure the distances of the moon and the sun (astronomy), demonstrate how to square a triangle (mathematics), dissect human corpses (anatomy) and study animals from bats to horses (biology). He created many military devices for his patrons (inventor). He was a virtuoso of the lyre, an early viola (musician). He also created poetry and drama (literature). The world was simply too small for Leonardo’s quests. He kept extraordinary notebooks for much of his adult life in which he drew plans for a helicopter, parachute, and a submarine. He was the greatest and first Renaissance Man even though no one in Milan would have understood that label during his lifetime. He was relentlessly curious. However, his curiosity was so extraordinary that he developed a negative reputation for not finishing many projects that he began.
His greatest creation is the Mona Lisa. The portrait is the most famous painting in the world, yet little is known about its creation or provenance. The painting is thought to be a portrait of Lisa Gherardini, the wife of Francesco del Giocondo, a wealthy silk merchant in Florence, Italy. It is believed to have been painted by Leonardo sometime between 1503-1506 despite evidence that he may have continued to work on the painting as late as 1517. Leonardo never sold the painting. He carried it with him throughout the remainder of his life.
The Mona Lisa Vanishes provides a biographical portrait of Leonardo for gifted secondary readers. Encourage these students to study the life of Leonardo and then write and illustrate a profile of his greatness for younger readers. “Leonardo Lives” might make an excellent title for a juvenile biography. Suggest further print and online research that can add dazzle to their Leonardo biographies. One example: How much is the Mona Lisa valued at today? (860 million to one billion dollars) Creative readers will no doubt find imaginative ways to share their newly acquired knowledge with younger siblings or schoolmates..
Day, Nicholas. The Mona Lisa Vanishes: A Legendary Painter, A Shocking Heist, And The Birth Of A Global Celebrity. Illus. by Brett Helquist. New York: Random House, 2023. Robert F. Sibert Medal, 2024.
