A hundred years ago, on Aug. 21, 1911, an Italian painter and
decorator slipped from the cupboard in the Louvre where he had
been hiding all night, stepped up to the Mona Lisa, freed her
from her frame and left the building apparently unseen. It was
24 hours before anyone noticed she was missing. The usual line
is that the Louvre was closed for maintenance and everyone
thought that somebody else must have removed the picture to be
photographed, or cleaned. But museums are — or were —
surprisingly blind to crime, even when it involves stealing the
world’s most famous painting. Or perhaps not the world’s most
famous painting — the Mona Lisa certainly wasn’t universally
known in 1911. You still had to travel to the Louvre to see her.
There were prints, though Leonardo da Vinci’s cumulative
portrait, gradually painted over several years, had long proved
extremely hard to copy as an engraving. And photographs did
exist — indeed the French police printed off 6,500 copies for
distribution in the streets of Paris imm