For a long time a by-word for impossibility in the city had been “like stealing the Mona Lisa from the Louvre”. The disappearance of the Mona Lisa shocked Paris. Soon the news burst out of the museum and onto the streets of Paris. The guard went to find out, only for his questions to set off a maelstrom of confusion that soon spiralled into panic. A painter who had been visiting the Louvre to paint the main exhibition hall noticed the “Mona Lisa” was missing and asked a guard when it would be brought back. It wasn’t until the morning of the 22nd of August that anybody noticed anything amiss. By the time he reached the street the Mona Lisa was wrapped in his smock – just a man with an anonymous white parcel who vanished into the crowd. In fact, when he found one door locked on his way out and took off the doorknob to try and unlock it, a passing workman not only believed his story about finding the door broken but put it back together and unlocked it for him. Nobody suspected that he was actually an impostor who had hidden in a cupboard the night before at closing time, and come out when everyone else arrived in the morning. Paintings were taken down for cleaning or photographing all the time, after all. Nobody noticed the man in the same white smock as every other staff member who took the Mona Lisa down off the wall. On Monday 21st, the museum was closed to the public as it was every Monday, while general maintenance and cleaning was carried out. Sunday the 20th August seemed to the staff of the Louvre just another day like any other. How did it become the most famous painting in the world? That story begins on a Sunday evening in the August of 1911. But though it was well known to students of art history and was a source of some pride to the citizens of Paris, back in the 19th century it was far from the international icon it is today. The Mona Lisa was thus considered a hugely important painting. The perspective on the the background was groundbreaking, while the use of shading on the face to accentuate the expression was almost immediately copied by every other artist working at the time. But even unfinished, it was a revolutionary work of art in its time. Instead it went with him to the court of King Francis I, and from there into the French state collection. Leonardo being Leonardo, he never actually finished the painting to his satisfaction, so the del Giacondas never got it. It was commissioned five hundred years ago from the master painter Leonardo da Vinci to celebrate the birth of her second son. That name for the painting is actually a pun, as it’s a portrait of a Florentine merchant’s wife named Lisa del Gioconda. Over six million people a year visit the Louvre in Paris to see La Gioconda – the Happy Woman. Nowadays the Mona Lisa needs no introduction – it’s the most famous painting in the world, after all.

The mona lisa