1911 Mona Lisa theft — The wrong modernists · 36

In November–December 1913 a man using the name Leonardo Vincenzo contacted Florentine dealer Alfredo Geri and Uffizi director Giovanni Poggi, offering the painting. Peruggia, a former Louvre glazier and handyman of Italian birth, was arrested in Florence. The portrait was authenticated, shown briefly in Italy and returned to the Louvre in January 1914. A Florence court convicted Peruggia; the sentence was short, and he cited a patriotic claim that the work should be in Italy.

The case is convicted and the object is back. What the theft changed was fame. A painting already respected by specialists became, after two years of 'WANTED' reproductions in newspapers, the most recognised portrait on earth. This page records the loss, the Florence recovery and the court. It does not reconstruct how a worker walked a panel out of a palace.

The 1911 theft is the type case of an art crime whose cultural afterlife dwarfs its legal one: one man convicted, one painting returned, a global icon born in the empty space. The object is a poplar-panel portrait painted by Leonardo in the early sixteenth century, already in the French royal then national collection. In 1911 it was important; it was not yet a pilgrimage image. The empty wall, photographed and described in Le Petit Parisien and foreign wires, did more for its fame than any salon catalogue.