News from Italy
Abduction of Mona Lisa from the Louvre
Ayfer Selamoğlu– One of the most famous paintings by Leonardo da Vinci in the world, “Mona Lisa” was the hero of a sensational theft. The painting was stolen from the Louvre Museum in Paris around 7 am on 21 August 1911: it was Monday, the museum was closed. The thief was the Italian Vincenzo Peruggia, who emigrated to France. Years later he tried to get it out from under the bed and sell it. “I stole it for Italy,” he said when he was captured. And he received as little punishment as possible, accompanied by the praises of the Italians.
The theft took place around seven in the morning on Monday 21 August 1911, the closing day of the Louvre. Peruggia entered the museum through the Jean Goujon door frequently used by the workers and made his way to the Salon Carré without anyone noticing his presence. After removing the picture from the wall, he walked towards the staircase of the Sept Mètres room, freeing himself from the frame and the glass. When he arrived in a little-used inner courtyard, he used the jacket he was wearing to wrap the painting. After leaving the museum without being stopped, he was brought home by a car, where he hid the Mona Lisa.
Having to go back to work to justify the delay, he said he had gotten drunk the previous day and was still suffering the consequences. Since the room in which he lived was very humid, fearing that the work could be damaged, Peruggia entrusted it to his compatriot Vincenzo Lancellotti, who lived in the same building. After having made a wooden box in which to keep it, he took it back and kept it painted with him.
The theft was ascertained the next morning, the exits were blocked, visitors searched and the entire museum was searched. It turned out that an exit door had been forced open and had no knob. Since that exit was frequented by the workers, the gendarmerie thought that the thief had mixed with them or was a worker himself, so all the permanent staff were questioned. Meanwhile an appeal was made to the citizens of Paris and an employee reported seeing a man walking away from the Louvre on Monday morning and throwing an object into a ditch near the road; there the missing knob was found. A reward of twenty-five thousand francs was announced for those who gave valid information and in the meantime the place left empty by the Mona Lisa on the wall of the Louvre was momentarily taken up by a painting by Raphael, the Portrait of Baldassarre Castiglione.
Two young men who would become famous in the fields of writing and art were mistakenly arrested as possible accomplices: Guillaume Apollinaire and Pablo Picasso, who however proved their extraneousness to the facts. After excluding the permanent staff of the museum from the responsibility for the theft, the gendarmerie concentrated on bricklayers, decorators and the staff hired for a short period or for a specific assignment, all people whose data were reported in the order register. Peruggia was interrogated and his modest room was subjected to an inspection which failed because the Mona Lisa was hidden in a special space created under the single table.
Two years had to pass before the Mona Lisa returned to ‘its’ place. In the autumn of 1913, the Florentine art collector Alfredo Geri decided to organize an exhibition in his gallery asking private individuals, through an advertisement in the newspapers, to lend him some works. He received a letter from Paris in which the sale of the Mona Lisa was proposed as long as the masterpiece returned to Italy and was kept there. The letter sent by Vincenzo Peruggia was signed by the fictional Monsieur Léonard V. Having consulted with Giovanni Poggi, director of the Royal Gallery of Florence, Geri set up a meeting with Monsieur Léonard on 11 December 1913 in a hotel in Florence. He presented himself with the director of the gallery who, after seeing the painting, took it into custody to examine it. Peruggia was arrested the following day by the carabinieri, who took him directly from his hotel room.
Peruggia argued that the display of Italian paintings brought to France by Napoleon Bonaparte at the Louvre inspired a sense of revenge and made the theft out of patriotism: he wanted to return at least one of the Italian paintings to his country. It didn’t matter which one. At first he had thought of Bella Giardiniera, but the exaggerated size of the painting discouraged him.