The theft that made the Mona Lisa famous

On 21 August 1911, a Monday when the museum was closed, the Mona Lisa left the Louvre hidden under a workman's white smock. Vincenzo Peruggia, an Italian glazier who had worked there, lifted it off the wall, removed the frame in a stairwell and simply walked out.

What happened next is the astonishing part: Paris lost its mind. Police interrogated the poet Apollinaire, who even spent nights in jail, and a young Picasso was called in to testify. For two years, crowds queued up to stare at the empty space on the wall.

Peruggia kept the painting in a trunk at his boarding house until 1913, when he tried to sell it to a Florence antiques dealer, convinced he was returning to Italy a treasure stolen by Napoleon — who in fact never took it: Leonardo brought it to France himself.

Before the theft, the Mona Lisa was a work admired by experts. It was the thief who turned it into the most famous painting on Earth.