The story is a single missing panel, a two-year press panic and a Florence arrest.
The public ending is a conviction and a return, not an empty frame.
Beats
- An empty wall in the Salon Carré
On 21 August 1911 the Mona Lisa left its place in the Louvre. Staff saw the gap on the 22nd. Paris police and European papers opened a missing-masterpiece file.
- The wrong modernists
Apollinaire's arrest and Picasso's questioning in September 1911 showed how a famous loss drags in famous names. Both were cleared.
- Twenty-eight months of reproductions
Newspapers printed the face as a wanted image. The painting's mass celebrity dates to this interval as much as to any earlier essay.
- Florence, winter 1913
Peruggia offered the panel through Alfredo Geri. Giovanni Poggi of the Uffizi examined it. Arrest and authentication followed in December.
- Home in January 1914
After Italian viewings the portrait returned to the Louvre. A Florence court convicted Peruggia on a short sentence. The case closed; the fame did not.
The 1911 theft is a convicted, recovered art crime whose real yield was a global icon.
Public-record encyclopedia. Not legal advice. Not a how-to. Graphic detail is withheld. Wars belong in a separate atlas.