Stealing the Mona Lisa

The 1911 theft of the Mona Lisa from the Louvre, a crime supposedly solved a little over two years after the heist, is garnering renewed interest in the form of two recent books. The New York Times reviews R. A. Scotti’s “Vanished Smile: The Mysterious Theft of Mona Lisa,” while over at Vanity Fair an excerpt from Dorothy and Thomas Hoobler’s “The Crimes of Paris: A True Story of Murder, Theft, and Detection” covers much of the same ground. Both books trace the sensational snatching of the painting, with interesting digressions and anecdotes about the Parisian art scene at the turn of the century. In the end, however, the crime remains somewhat of a mystery, as the only person convicted for it, Vincenzo Perugia, gave wildly varying accounts of the heist, leading many to suspect that he was covering up a much larger forgery scheme surrounding the painting.

Also in relation to the smiling lady, an article at the Art Newspaper details another close escape by the painting, this time from a malfunctioning sprinkler. In 1963, the Mona Lisa made its first trip into the United States, coming to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and narrowly avoided disaster from a sprinkler that showered the masterpiece for a few hours one night—an incident the museum discreetly did not mention to the public at the time.