Mona Lisa was whisked away from the Louvre by an Italian patriot in 1911
As if that inscrutable Mona Lisa wasn’t famous enough, in 1911, the Louvre was shut down for an entire week during a world-famous investigation over the painting’s theft.
Yet it took two whole years, and erroneous accusations of French poet Guillaume Apollinaire and even Pablo Picasso, to find the real thief – a Louvre employee by the name of Vincenzo Peruggia.
Peruggia, an Italian patriot, waited in a broom cupboard in the museum overnight, and persuaded a plumber to allow him to exit the building having procured the painting, in an apparent attempt to return it to its Italian homeland. That motive made him a hero in the Italian press, but not, unfortunately for him, in the eyes of the jury. He was convicted in 1914.