Until 1911, the Mona Lisa was a celebrated painting in the Louvre, but not yet the most famous picture in the world. That changed on a Monday in August, when the museum was closed to the public. A Louvre handyman named Vincenzo Peruggia, who had helped make the protective glass cases for the paintings, lifted the little poplar panel off the wall, carried it out under his smock, and went home. The loss was not confirmed until the next day.
Newspapers around the world ran the story for two years. Crowds came to the Louvre just to look at the empty space on the wall. The poet Guillaume Apollinaire was arrested on suspicion, and Pablo Picasso was questioned. In 1913, Peruggia was caught in Florence when he tried to sell the painting to an antiques dealer. He said he wanted to return it to Italy, and he served less than a year in prison.
The painting itself has plenty of oddities. Leonardo never delivered it to the sitter's family. The woman is generally identified as Lisa Gherardini, wife of the Florentine silk merchant Francesco del Giocondo, which is why the painting is called La Gioconda in Italian, a name that also means the joyful one. Leonardo kept the panel with him for the rest of his life and took it to France, where he died in 1519. Napoleon later hung it in his bedroom.
Look at her face closely and you will notice there are no eyebrows. High-resolution scans published in 2007 suggested she once had them, and that they faded or were lost to old cleanings. Her smile is the product of a technique called sfumato, soft blended transitions with no hard outlines, which makes the corners of the mouth seem to shift as your eye moves.
The theft taught the world that art could be news, and the Mona Lisa has been a celebrity ever since, a status artists have teased for more than a century. In 1919 Marcel Duchamp drew a mustache and a goatee on a postcard of her.
Leonardo's Mona Lisa appears on our: