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The heist that made the Mona Lisa famous
In 1911, a former Louvre employee perpetrated one of the greatest art heists in history: the theft of Leonardo da Vinci’s immortal painting “Mona Lisa.”
On the evening of Sunday, August 20, 1911, a small, mustachioed man entered the Louvre museum in Paris and made his way to the Salon Carré, where the Da Vinci painting was housed alongside several other masterworks. After checking to see if the coast was clear, the thief strode up to the Mona Lisa, plucked it off the wall and carried it to a nearby service stairwell, where he removed its wooden canvas from a protective glass frame. The New York Times wrote that “a great number of citizens have turned amateur Sherlock Holmeses, and continue to advance most extraordinary theories.” Some argued that American banking magnate J.P. Morgan had commissioned the heist to bolster his private art collection; still others believed the Germans had masterminded it to disgrace the French.
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