Forbidden History - The Theft That Made the Mona Lisa Famous

Episode Date: July 7, 2026

In this episode of Forbidden History, Dominic Selwood joins us as we explore the truth behind the heist that changed the art world forever, and transformed the Mona Lisa into a global phenomenon. PATREON LINK HERE: https://patreon.com/ForbiddenHistory?utm_medium=unknown&utm_source=join_link&utm_campaign=creatorshare_creator&utm_content=copyLink Cast List: Eric Meyers: Narrator Dominic Selwood: Journalist & Historian Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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The most famous painting in the world wasn't always famous. But for all the Mona Lisa's history, there was more to the immortal cultural icon than meets the eye. So what happened in 1911 that would change the painting's exposure forever? The Mona Lisa is a small painting with a big story.

The real reason that it got absolute global fame was because of an incident that occurred in 1911 and the media exposure that followed. Vincent Perruja, it can be said, was the best PR agent the Mona Lisa ever had. The theft of the Mona Lisa would permanently change how the world saw it. transformed from a respected Renaissance portrait into an icon.

The theft created a global media frenzy. To understand the theft and the theories that flourished, we are joined by historian and author Dominic Selwood. He will help guide us through one of the most influential and daring heists the art world has ever seen. The Mona Lisa is a small painting with a big story. Itself, it is small, it's just 77 by 53 centimetres, and it's painted not onto canvas, but onto a panel of poplar wood.

The painting shows a seated woman from the waist up. She's got her hands folded, and she's turned slightly towards the viewer. Behind her, there's an imaginary atmospheric landscape of winding paths and distant mountains. The painting was begun in perhaps 1503 by none other than Leonardo. Da Vinci, and he continued to work on it for many years after beginning it. The woman in the picture is usually identified as Lisa Gerardini. Her husband was the Florentine merchant Francesco del Jacondo. So she's therefore known as La Joconda, the feminized form of the name of her husband.

So her name was Lisa, and Mona is short for Madonna. So it actually means my lady. So my lady Lisa is what Mona Lisa means. In Italian, it's still La Joconda, and in French it's La Joconde. So one way or another, even though people think nobody knows who the sitter is, it's actually in the name in many languages. The Mona Lisa was ahead of its time for 15th century Florence. Many things make it stand out.

The sitter's gaze engages onlookers' lookers' directly, holding eye contact. Unlike conventional portraits of submissive women at the time, she also wears no restrictive wedding jewelry or elaborate headdresses that often symbolized a woman being the property of her husband. Leonardo was known for a technique called sfumato, and what that literally means is smoked or blurred. And Leonardo applied thin glazes to blur edges and transitions in his paintings. And one result is that the portrait feels soft and her expression seems endlessly changeable.

And this is behind the enigmatic feel that the painting is often said to have because it seems that her eyes and mouth are so softened that they allow for multiple readings by different viewers. Because the painting is by Leonardo, of course there are huge number of theories about what it may contain. Obviously, as a work of art, it's extraordinary in and of itself with Leonardo's style,

the background, the subject matter. But what people have projected into it, of course, is a lot of the mysteries around Leonardo, who's often tied to many things that come up in theories about hidden structures, concealed and esoteric knowledge. But so far, there's been no finding of anything of that kind underneath the painting. Many conspiracy theories speculate that the painting hides coded symbols, secret societies, or religious messages. Modern imaging techniques, including infrared scanning, have revealed an underdrawing beneath the surface. Some researchers have even suggested the underdrawing shows a small hairpin

that might indicate the figure was originally conceived as an allegorical or idolized figure, rather than a straightforward portrait. The fame of the picture is partly that it was painted by Leonardo, but partly also because of the aesthetics of the picture. However, the real reason that it got absolute global fame was because of an incident that occurred in 1911 and the media exposure that followed. Leonardo originally painted the picture in Florence. But the Mona Lisa's journey extended far beyond the borders of Italy.

But then he took it to France when he went there. And the king of France, Francois I, bought it in 1518, and he put it into his royal collection. It stayed in that royal collection for centuries, travelling around the various royal residences like Fontainebleau and Versailles. It finally became public property during the revolution, and it's been in the Louvre now for centuries. Once the Mona Lisa had reached the Louvre, it was not very popular, and the general public typically ignored it. But one man did not ignore it, and his actions would change the course of history and the art world forever. Vincent Perugia was a 30-year-old Italian,

working-class migrant living in Paris. He worked for the Louvre as a glazier, painter and handyman. Perugia was not a career criminal, and he wasn't a master planner, but he had one advantage. He knew the building better than the guards did. Having worked there for years, he knew the museum top to bottom. The Louvre was closed on Monday, August 21st, 1911, as it was on most of Mondays. It seems that Perugia may be entered with other workers that morning or had possibly been hidden in the museum the night before. At 5'3 foot three, he was a smallish man and so able to have secreted himself in various cupboards or small spaces in the museum. The Louvre at the time didn't have many guards, perhaps only around 150, but the collection and the space was

already vast, so it was underguarded. On that Monday morning, Perugia made for the Salon Carre, which is the room where the Mona Lisa was held, and he just lifted it off the wall. He then took it into a service staircase and threw away the frame, so was just left with the board with the painting on it. He hid the painting under his white regulation Louvre employees smock. that he was wearing, and continued down the staircase. Finding the exit barred by a locked door, he removed the doorknob with a screwdriver. It still didn't work, so he enlisted the help of a plumber who opened it for him with a key and some pliers.

He then exited the building, got onto a bus and took it home. Today, the Louvre is one of the most secure museums in the world. However, in 1911, it was anything but. The museum was severely understaffed. There were virtually no alarm systems, sensors, or mechanical deterrence in place. And because the museum did not charge admission at the time, there was little to no monitoring of who entered or exited the building. At the Louvre, nobody noticed anything on that Monday.

On the Tuesday morning, when the museum reopened, the artist Louis Beirou visited the room where the Mona Lisa was to sketch it. When he saw it wasn't there, he assumed it had been taken away to be photographed. And it was only at 11 a.m. in the morning that he went and found somebody and made inquiries to ask where it was. As the museum hunted round to try and find it, they eventually realised that it had been stolen. At that, panic erupted and the museum closed again to the public. possibly for as much as a week. Investigators would later admit that the theft revealed serious systemic failures in museum security.

Once the Louvre publicly announced the theft, it made front-page news globally. This was a huge story. Something had been stolen from the Louvre, which was already a world-famous museum. And it elevated the Mona Lisa, which had been admired as a Renaissance painting, to suddenly to suddenly, overnight, becoming one of the most famous painted images in the world. As French police scrambled to find a culprit, Perugia hid in plain sight at his apartment in Paris. However, as with most art heists throughout history, the theft is not necessarily the hardest part. It is what to do with the stolen items after. Perugia knew that this wasn't a painting that he could take and show public.

so he played the long game with it. He kept it in his flat for two years in a trunk with a false bottom and occasionally he took it out and propped it up on his kitchen table and enjoyed looking at it. The police conducted extensive investigations and they arrested a great number of people. One of them was the poet, Guillem Apollinaire. He had been connected to a man

who had previously stolen a collection of statuettes from the museum so seemed a likely person to bring in. Apollinaire, in fact, named his good friend Pablo Picasso, who still had some of the stolen statuettes in his studio. As much as Perugia allegedly enjoyed looking at the painting in his kitchen, eventually it became clear to him that he had to finish the job he started and find a customer to purchase the Mona Lisa. Perugia bided his time.

He waited until November 1913. to make a move. He smuggled it then to Italy, in a trunk, and he hold himself up in a hotel in Florence, where he contacted an art dealer called Alfredo Geri, and told him he had the Mona Lisa. Jerry then contacted Giovanni Podgi, who was director of the city's Uffizi Gallery.

Through that connection, Perugia offered the Mona Lisa to the Afizi for five, 500,000 lira. The Uffizi played along, and after Perugia had dropped the painting off at the museum, he returned to his hotel room where the police arrived and arrested him. Perugia told the police that he'd stolen the Mona Lisa, not for personal gain, but as an act of patriotism in order to return it to its rightful home in Italy, because he believed that Napoleon Bonaparte had seized it from Italy and taken it to France, which of course was wrong because Leonardo had taken it to France. But that was Perugia's defence.

Unfortunately, the wider evidence shows that he hadn't really done it as a patriotic thing. He'd done it because he hoped to sell it to dealers in other countries. And he'd even written to his family telling them he was about to come into a large amount of money. Such disputes over art are not unusual. The loss of a work in this magnitude often reflects larger tensions around cultural restitution and historical looting, as seen in the case of the Parthalan sculptures, known as the Elgin Marbles. They were removed from Greece in the early 19th century by Lord Elgin, and are now housed in the British Museum, despite Greece long campaigning for their return, sparking the debate of whether artifacts should be long.

to their country of origin. If you would like to hear more about the Parthenon sculptures and their journey or fate, please check out our three-part series, The Secrets of the Parthenon. Italy had a strong cultural grievance dating back to the Napoleonic Wars, when French forces removed thousands of artworks

from Italian cities and transported them to Paris. Even though many were later returned, turned, the belief that France had looted Italian culture stayed. This helps explain why Vincenzo Perugia's patriotic defense resonated with many Italians. In Italy, some newspapers even celebrated him as a national hero, rather than a criminal. There are stories that Perugia pulled off the original theft with help from accomplices, but by the time the police had done all the interviews, it was only Perugia who was tried for it. Because the theft seemed so audacious, many people believe it had to be part of a larger conspiracy.

In 1911, tensions between France and Germany were at a breaking point, just years before World War I. Many French citizens and officials refused to believe a single thief could bypass Louvre's security, leading to theories of sabotage from German agents, with the alleged motive to embarrass the French government and prove their incompetence on a global stage. Rumors again circulated, this time that a professional gang was involved. One early suspect was Eddie Guerin, a notorious international thief who had recently escaped the French penal colony, Maroni, close to the infamous Devil's Island. Experts argued that the thief must have had partners inside the Louvre who knew the security

and the layout of the building perfectly. But the most famous theory of all was the Val-Fierno scam, popularized by journalist Carl Decker in a 1932 Saturday Evening Post article. An Argentinian conman, Eduardo de Valfierno, supposedly commissioned the theft not to own the original, but to make it disappear. While the world searched for the missing painting, he allegedly sold high-quality forgeries

to wealthy American millionaires. But, since the original was missing, they had no way to verify theirs was a fake. While a great story, most historians now believe Val Fierno was a fictional character invented by Decker. Throughout this two-year period that left everyone completely bewildered as to the whereabouts of the painting, Perugia planned his next move, though not with much success.

As the police investigations widened, they also found out that Perugia had connections in the criminal underworld. Nevertheless, Italy, like many European countries at the time, was patriotic, and people were broadly sympathetic to Perugia's story. As a result, when he came up for trial, he was sentenced to only one year and 15 days' imprisonment. And even that got reduced to seven months and nine days, and he was in fact released immediately for the time he'd already served. World War I was now approaching and Vincent went off to fight for Italy in World War I. Then he returned and settled in France again, where he married and had a family.

He died in France at age 44, possibly of lead poisoning from house painting work that he'd been doing. The Mona Lisa stayed in Italy for a little while on display so the excited public could see it, And then it was returned to the Louvre in Paris, where it was now consolidated as a national treasure. After Perugia's death, the Mona Lisa remained immortalized, cementing its legendary status. Propeled by the infamous theft in 1911, it now has a legacy stronger than ever, still being viewed by millions of tourists annually. And beyond the Louvre, the artwork has inspired countless artistic homagees. featuring in major Hollywood films, digital restorations and scholarly studies designed to

uncover any further artistic secrets of the world's most famous painting. The Mona Lisa is now housed in a specialized bulletproof glass case with dedicated security, setting a precedent for protecting the museum's high value iconic items. Although it's not something people think of often, museums in fact have been victims to a huge number of thefts over the centuries. Particularly in the 1700s and 1800s, theft was pretty common from museums, in Britain, in France, in Germany, because systems of security were far less advanced than they are now. But even in the modern day and age, thieves have managed to steal from the Louvre, from the British Museum, from

places like Buckingham Palace. There really isn't, as most police officers will tell you, any building that can be made 100% theft-proof, and obviously, given the huge value of things in museums, they are regularly targeted by thieves. And while many thefts fade into obscurity, occasionally one comes along that rewrites history, a theft so audacious that it transformed the way the entire world sees it. The impact of the theft on the history of the Mona Lisa was gargantuan.

The saturation publicity that the newspapers gave the Mona Lisa had taken it out of the world of art specialists and into worldwide public consciousness. Before 1911, it had not really been particularly widely known beyond a circle of critics and it really wasn't in any way the most visited object in the Louvre. But after the theft, it became the Louvre's most prized possession. And even in the early days after the theft, owing to the media coverage, crowds went along just to see the empty wall space where this amazing painting had once hung. Once it had been returned, the anxiety over another theft meant it became a painting that people absolutely must see, thereby increasing its popularity. Vincent Perugia, it can be said, was the best PR agent the Mona Lisa ever had.

In the end, it's a curious irony that the world's most famous painting may owe its legend not just to Da Vinci, but to a thief whose initial success far outweighed his judgment. Thanks for exploring the past with us today. If you like this episode, don't forget to leave a comment below, and feel free to leave us a rating or review. Your feedback helps us reach more listeners like you. Thanks for listening.