The Mona Lisa Vanishes: A Legendary Painter, a Shocking Heist, and the Birth of a Global Celebrity

The Mona Lisa Vanishes: A Legendary Painter, A Shocking Heist, and the Birth of a Global Celebrity (2023) is a work of narrative nonfiction for middle-grade readers written by Nicholas Day and illustrated by Brett Helquist. The story begins in 1911 with the shocking theft of the Mona Lisa from Paris’s Louvre Museum, then travels back to 15th-century Florence to explore the painting’s improbable origins. The revelation of the thief unfolds like a mystery thriller as the book explores the relationship between art and technology, the impact of historical events, and the importance of retaining a sense of wonder and curiosity. The Mona Lisa Vanishes won various accolades, including a Sibert Medal, a Horn Book Award, and was selected as a best book of the year by Publishers Weekly, School Library Journal, Booklist, Kirkus Reviews, NPR, amongst others.

This guide uses the 2023 Penguin Random House e-book.

Content Warning: The source text includes discussions of colonialism, racism, misogyny, and death by suicide.

Summary

The book begins by introducing the two historical figures responsible for the Mona Lisa’s existence: Italian Renaissance luminary Leonardo da Vinci and Lisa Gherardini. Leonardo’s portrait of Lisa would make her face the most identifiable in the world, but first it would have to be stolen.

In 1911, the Mona Lisa vanished from Paris’s Louvre Museum. The story of its theft is the story of how it became the world’s most famous painting. It is also the story of how assumptions and expectations can shape outcomes for the worst, something Leonardo understood and avoided but the police in 1911 Paris did not.

Nobody at the Louvre, from the director to the security guards, believed the painting could be stolen. Thus, when the guard on duty realized it was missing, he assumed it had been removed by photographers. The Louvre’s entire collection was in the process of being photographed, then an emerging technology. Photographers would remove and replace paintings at their pleasure, without authorization or notification. It was only when a patron grew impatient waiting for the Mona Lisa to be brought back that the guard realized the photographers did not have it.

Paris police chief Louis Lépine, who took charge of the investigation, assumed the Mona Lisa was misplaced somewhere on the premises and ordered the museum searched. When the search revealed its discarded frame and glass box, he finally had to admit that the painting must have been stolen. Newspapers seized on the story, and Paris immediately became obsessed, fueled by daily cover articles. The story went global. As the days wore on with no leads, clairvoyants and fortune tellers began to offer theories, no two of which matched and none of which revealed the painting’s whereabouts. When the Louvre reopened without the Mona Lisa, it welcomed record crowds fascinated by the story.

Lépine collaborated with Alphonse Bertillon, a pioneer in forensic science, but their expectations and assumptions led to mistakes. Bertillon dusted the glass box for fingerprints and discovered a thumbprint, but his system for identifying criminals through measurement was so laborious and provided so much data that the thumbprint would only be valuable if they already had a suspect to test it against.

Since Lépine and Bertillon held their skills in high regard, they expected the criminal likewise to be a professional. The press ran with their theory, and people believed what they read. For a short while, Adam Worth, who successfully carried out bank heists and forgeries without being caught, was believed to be the Mona Lisa’s thief, even though he had died the decade before. A professional thief raised the possibility of a commissioned theft: Eventually, American millionaire J. P. Morgan had to publicly deny the rumor that he had been offered the painting.

Several years before the Mona Lisa was stolen, a Belgian native, Géry Pieret, stole statues from the Louvre for painter Pablo Picasso. The Louvre never knew they were missing, but the story came to light during the Mona Lisa investigation, implicating Picasso and poet Guillaume Apollinaire, his close friend. None were involved with the theft, but all were tarnished by the appearance of involvement.

The real thief, Vincenzo Perugia, was only discovered because he revealed himself to a Florentine art dealer, Alfredo Geri, in November 1913. Lépine and Bertillon could have caught him. They had determined the theft was an inside job, and Perugia had worked on the crew that installed the glass boxes. However, they never considered him a serious suspect because he was an immigrant worker. Geri consulted with Giovanni Poggi, the Uffizi museum’s director, and the two convinced the thief to leave the painting with them, then reported him to the police. Perugia claimed he was driven by patriotism, but his story conflicted with his own history of robbery and his failed attempt to sell the painting to a French art dealer. Despite this, his claims to want to restore Italy’s art to its homeland won him the support of the Italian press and public, and he was eventually released. The Italian government returned the Mona Lisa to France, where it was welcomed by enthusiastic crowds who had only become aware of its existence because it was stolen.

Photography was not the only new technology emerging at the time of the Mona Lisa’s theft. Train and air travel had begun to shrink distances between people. Higher literacy rates created a larger reading public eager to consume sensational stories. In the art world, Picasso was revolutionizing the rules of perspective, and poets were pushing the boundaries of form. The old rules and expectations were changing, but people did not understand these new rules or how to navigate them.

The world was also changing when Leonardo was born in 1452. It was a time of cultural and scientific reinvention. Leonardo’s parents were not married and were of different social classes, which meant that they could never marry and Leonardo could never be legitimate. His paternal grandparents raised him alongside his legitimate siblings, but he was a perpetual outsider.

After his father arranged for him to apprentice with a painter, Leonardo quickly revealed his exceptional talent. Using oil paint, he developed a technique called sfumato, which blurred the edges of images, mimicking how human eyes perceive them. Leonardo had an insatiable curiosity that made it difficult for him to complete his projects. In 1481, he abandoned Florence to travel to Milan, where he was eager to meet with philosophers, doctors, and mathematicians. His notebooks brimmed with questions and observations from the dissections he conducted, but after the French army invaded Italy, he had to flee the city. This brought him back to Florence, setting the stage for his fateful commission to paint a portrait of Lisa Gherardini.

Nobody knows why he agreed to paint her or even whether he ever completed her portrait. When he went to France in 1516 at the invitation of the French king, he carried the painting with him, and it remained there. His possibly unfinished portrait is now famous, inspiring legions of tourists to photograph it.