When “Mona Lisa” Was Stolen In 1911 And Why The Police Questioned Picasso
Updated: Aug 21
On the morning of 22 August 1911, a Louvre worker looked up at an empty wall where the Mona Lisa should have been and assumed it had been taken off for photography. It hadn't. The world's most famous painting had already been missing for a day and nobody had noticed. What followed was two years of dead ends, a genuine fingerprint mismatch by France's top criminologist, a terrified Pablo Picasso crying under police questioning and a thief who'd once helped build the very display case he later broke into.
Quick Answers
Who stole the Mona Lisa in 1911? Vincenzo Peruggia, an Italian handyman who'd briefly worked at the Louvre years earlier fitting protective glass cases, including the one built for the Mona Lisa itself.
Why was Picasso questioned? Not over the painting directly. He and his friend Guillaume Apollinaire were caught up in a separate, real Louvre theft involving stolen sculptures Picasso had used as inspiration for one of his most important paintings.
The Empty Wall Nobody Noticed
The painter Louis Béroud arrived at the Louvre that Tuesday morning to copy the Mona Lisa for a piece of his own. When he asked a guard where it had gone, he was told it was probably off being photographed, which was common enough practice at the time. Béroud carried on with his work and came back hours later to find the wall still bare. Only then did anyone check.
Security at the Louvre in 1911 was nowhere near what people assume. The museum had around 200 guards covering roughly 400 rooms, no alarms on individual works and a public that was allowed to wander close enough to paintings to sketch or photograph them without much supervision. The theft also fell on exactly the right day to go unnoticed. Monday was the Louvre's regular weekly closure, kept shut to the public so staff could clean, and the guard numbers dropped accordingly, from around 166 on a normal day to as few as 12. When the theft was confirmed, the Louvre shut its doors for a full week and the director, informed his prize painting had vanished, reportedly scoffed that stealing the Mona Lisa would be like someone stealing the towers of Notre Dame.
The Plumber, the Print and the Wrong Hand
The thief's actual exit was almost absurdly low key. Early that Monday, before the museum opened, a plumber named Sauvet found a man in a workman's smock stuck behind a locked door. The man pointed out that the doorknob was missing, so Sauvet let him out with a pair of pliers. Under the smock was the Mona Lisa, wrapped and hidden. Nobody thought twice about a maintenance worker leaving the building.
France's police called in Alphonse Bertillon, the criminologist credited with pioneering criminal identification through measurements and, more famously here, fingerprints. Bertillon's team lifted a clear thumbprint from the painting's abandoned glass case and frame. It should have cracked the case fast, since the thief actually had a police record and was already on file. But Bertillon's system only catalogued right hand prints, and the print left on the frame was from a left thumb. The match sat unrecognised in the files for two years.
Bertillon's own approach to criminal identification, developed years earlier through his physical measurement system, gets a fuller look in our piece on his Tableau Synoptique work if you want the wider story of how forensic science actually got its start.
Picasso, Apollinaire and the Statues in the Sock Drawer
With no real leads, police leaned on informants and known criminal contacts, which is how they ended up at a Belgian conman named Honoré-Joseph Géry Pieret. Pieret had worked as secretary to the poet Guillaume Apollinaire, a close friend of Picasso's, and had bragged in a newspaper letter about years of casually walking out of the Louvre with small artefacts, since security really was that loose. He never named names, but reporters connected the dots quickly enough.
What made it dangerous for Picasso specifically was that Pieret's hauls included two ancient Iberian stone heads, stolen from Louvre storage in 1907, which Pieret had sold on to Picasso himself. Picasso didn't just own them. He'd studied their blocky, unfussy features closely enough that they shaped the faces in Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, the 1907 painting now widely credited with helping kick off Cubism and modern art as a movement. A recent book by art crime historian Noah Charney goes further, arguing Picasso may have commissioned the theft outright rather than just receiving stolen goods, since the pieces were sitting in storage rather than on display and had to be deliberately sought out.
When the Mona Lisa investigation put pressure on anyone connected to Louvre thefts, Picasso and Apollinaire panicked. According to later accounts from both men, they spent a night dragging a suitcase with the two heads through Paris, planning to throw it in the Seine before losing their nerve. Apollinaire eventually smuggled the statues back to the newspaper where he worked, anonymously. Neither man was ever charged over the statuettes, but both were hauled in for questioning specifically over the Mona Lisa. Picasso reportedly wore his favourite red and white polka dot shirt to the interrogation, cried, and, under oath, denied ever having met Apollinaire before, a claim so obviously false it did him no favours. Both were cleared within weeks.
Apollinaire's Week in a Cell
Apollinaire had it worse than Picasso. On 7 September 1911, investigating judge Joseph-Marie Drioux had him arrested outright and sent to La Santé prison, partly on the strength of the statuette connection and partly because Apollinaire had once written, provocatively, that the Louvre should be burned down. He spent about five days behind bars before being released for lack of evidence. The scandal claimed a bigger scalp too. Louvre director Théophile Homolle, already under fire for the museum's lax security, was forced to resign over the affair.
Apollinaire later told friends the guards had been kind to him, bringing him eau de nénuphar, a water lily infusion, to calm his nerves. He also wrote one of his best known poems in his cell, À la Prison de la Santé, later published in his 1913 collection Alcools. It's a strange footnote to an art heist: a genuine masterpiece of French poetry, written by a man wrongly locked up over a painting he had nothing to do with.
The Man Who Helped Build His Own Trapdoor
The real thief, Vincenzo Peruggia, wasn't a stranger to the building. He'd worked at the Louvre as a glazier and decorator, fitting protective glass over several major paintings, including, by most accounts, the very case built around the Mona Lisa. He knew the museum's layout, its staff routines and exactly how that case came apart. He also already had a police record from two earlier arrests, one for attempting to rob a prostitute and another for carrying a gun during a fight, so his fingerprints were already on file when the investigation began.
Investigators actually questioned him twice. Once in the immediate aftermath, and again in November 1911 when police worked through every current and former Louvre employee. Both times Peruggia gave the same alibi, that he'd overslept the Monday of the theft because he'd been drinking the night before, and both times it was accepted without much scrutiny. One respected account of the case, published by the Smithsonian, adds a detail most retellings leave out entirely: Peruggia may not have acted alone. Two other Italian handymen, brothers named Vincenzo and Michele Lancellotti, are named in some records as having hidden in the museum with him overnight and helped pry open the case. Peruggia never implicated them and no charges were ever brought against anyone but him, so the single-thief version remains the official story, but it isn't the only one on record.
His stated motive was patriotic. Peruggia believed the Mona Lisa had been looted from Italy and should go home, seemingly unaware that Leonardo had actually sold the painting himself to the French King Francis I centuries earlier while working as his court painter. He later claimed his first choice had actually been Raphael's La Belle Jardinière, only abandoned because the painting was too large to carry out unnoticed. The patriotic story also sits awkwardly next to his own private correspondence. In a letter to his father four months after the theft, Peruggia wrote about needing money, which fits with a separate theory tying him to an art dealer running a scheme to sell forged copies of the Mona Lisa once the original went missing and a fake started to look more valuable.
Two Years in a Trunk
Peruggia kept the painting hidden in his small Paris apartment for close to two years, tucked away for stretches in a trunk with a false bottom. He turned down at least one chance to simply hand it back for a reward, worried it would mean arrest. Eventually he grew impatient, moved to Florence with the painting still hidden in the trunk, and wrote to a well known antique dealer there, Alfredo Geri, signing the letter with a false name, Leonardo Vincenzo, and offering to “return” the Mona Lisa to Italy for a price.
Geri, suspicious, brought in Giovanni Poggi, director of Florence's Uffizi Gallery, to authenticate the painting under the pretence of a genuine sale. The two men met Peruggia at his hotel room, where he pulled the painting out of the trunk's false bottom. Poggi checked it against the Louvre's own catalogue markings and the distinctive craquelure, the fine web of age cracks unique to old paint, and confirmed it within minutes. Police arrested Peruggia in that same hotel room before he'd even left Florence. Geri was later awarded 25,000 francs and France's Legion of Honour for his part in recovering the painting.
A Sympathetic Court
Peruggia's trial opened in Florence in June 1914. He'd already confessed, so the proceedings were less about guilt and more about how lightly he could be let off. A court appointed psychiatrist, testing his mental state with a simple riddle about birds sitting in a tree, came away unconvinced of his intelligence and judged him only partially responsible for his own actions. Combined with the wave of Italian public sympathy for his patriotic story, and letters, cake and wine sent to him in his cell by admirers, it worked. From his cell, Peruggia wrote directly to the public prosecutor asking for bail, insisting he'd been driven purely by pride for his nation rather than any personal gain. Bail was refused, but the leniency showed up in his sentence anyway: one year and fifteen days, cut down further on appeal to seven months, most of which he'd already served waiting for trial.
The Mona Lisa went on brief public display across Italy, drawing enormous crowds, before being returned to the Louvre in January 1914. Peruggia himself largely vanished from the story after that. He served in the Italian army once the First World War broke out, eventually returned to France, married and had a daughter, and died near Paris in 1925 at 44, a low key ending for a man who'd once had all of Italy cheering him on.
What the Theft Actually Did to the Painting
The Mona Lisa was well regarded before 1911, but it wasn't yet the single most famous object in the art world. The theft changed that almost overnight. Newspapers were still a relatively new mass phenomenon, and the story of a masterpiece vanishing into thin air ran everywhere, turning a Renaissance portrait into a genuine international celebrity. Crowds lined up just to look at the bare wall where it used to hang.
The painting's later run of near misses only added to the legend. It survived an acid attack and a thrown rock in 1956, a can of red paint sprayed at it in Tokyo in 1974 and a teacup thrown at it by a frustrated visitor in 2009, all deflected by the protective glass installed after Peruggia's theft.
The Louvre Still Hasn't Fully Learned the Lesson
It's worth saying that 1911 wasn't the Louvre's last brush with a headline theft. In October 2025, a gang broke into the museum's Galerie d'Apollon in broad daylight, cut through display cases with power tools and made off with eight pieces of the French Crown Jewels worth roughly 88 million euros, all in under eight minutes. Several suspects have since been arrested, but as of mid-2026 the jewels themselves are still missing, with investigators tracing leads as far as Belgium's diamond trade. More than a century apart, both cases share an uncomfortable thread: a museum holding some of the most valuable objects on earth, caught out by gaps in its own security.
For a case that didn't end quite so neatly, our piece on the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum heist covers the largest unsolved art theft in history, a $500 million haul from a Boston museum in 1990 that's still never been recovered.
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● Empty Frames and Unanswered Questions: The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum Heist
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