The Housepainter Who Stole the Mona Lisa: The Lies, Legends, and Lunacy of the 1911 Theft

by Joe Medeiros

 

On December 11, 1913, in a cheap hotel room in Florence, a small Italian man unlocked a white wooden trunk, lifted out a false bottom, and handed an antique dealer the Mona Lisa. The painting had been missing from the Louvre for 843 days. The thief was Vincenzo Peruggia, a housepainter with a police record and his fingerprints on file in Paris. The next day he was arrested with 1.75 francs in his pocket, not enough to pay for his room.

 

This is the first book in English to make Peruggia himself the subject. He always said he stole the painting to return it to Italy. His letters to his family, found in the State Archives in Florence and never before published, tell another story.

 

The book also traces every legend the theft produced, from the Marquis de Valfierno's six forgeries to the German spy Peruggia invented in 1915, back to where it started. It draws on more than 2,400 photographs of documents from the French and Italian archives, and on time spent with Peruggia's daughter, Celestina, and her children.

 

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