An Irishman's Diary

PARIS IS half-deserted in August. I say half-deserted, because tourists are here in vast numbers. Only the indigenous population is missing. Every second business has a sign advising customers that the owners are on their “congé annuel de vacance”, so that the city feels abandoned and defenceless. If the annual burglary statistics don’t spike around now, it must be because the burglars are on holiday too.

No doubt it was the same 100 years ago this weekend, when a man named Vincenzo Peruggia pulled off the "art crime of the century". Not that it took much ingenuity. An Italian house painter and glazier who had worked in the Louvre, he simply walked into the museum on August 20th, 1911 – a Sunday – knowing it would be closed the following day. He then secreted himself overnight and, on Monday morning, walked out again, this time carrying the Mona Lisaunder his smock.

It was a standard Louvre smock, common to staff. So even a last-minute hitch with a doorknob that wouldn’t open, requiring assistance from a museum plumber, did not blow his cover.

Peruggia was a small man: little over 5ft. But the Mona Lisais even smaller. Removed from its frame, it fitted easily under his overalls. When the plumber was later shown photographs of all current and former staff, he didn't pick the culprit from among them.

News of the theft dawned slowly on Paris. La Gioconda's absence was first noticed on Tuesday morning by an artist who had come to draw sketches of her. Even then, it was assumed she was being photographed elsewhere for promotional purposes. The artist quipped to a museum guard: "When women are not with their lovers, they are apt to be with their photographers." The joke soon turned sour, however. And when the truth became known, great was the soul-searching. A year earlier, before departing for his own annual holidays, the director of France's national museums had boasted of the Louvre's security. "You might as well pretend that one could steal the towers of the cathedral of Notre-Dame," he declared then. The scandal cost him his job.

Although far from being a criminal mastermind, Peruggia avoided detection in the huge investigation that followed. This was partly luck and partly the incompetence of others. In what was clearly an inside job, after all, he was an obvious suspect.

Moreover, he had left a finger-print at the scene and, although it was still a new technology then, the police had his prints from a previous misdemeanour. Unfortunately, the practice was to take only a right-hand impression, and the Louvre print was from his left. So for this and other reasons, he escaped the net. It was only his subsequent stupidity that undid him.

In the meantime, among those investigated for the crime were Pablo Picasso and the anarchist poet, Guillaume Apollinaire. Apollinaire had once called for the Louvre to be burned down. But it was his friendship with a Belgian ne’er-do-well who was known to have previously stolen artifacts from the Louvre, that implicated him.

Apollinaire in turn fingered Picasso who, as it happened, was in possession of a pair of statuettes stolen by the Belgian and had used them as models in one of his paintings. In the end, however, the Picasso-Apollinaire line of inquiry led nowhere.

And the Mona Lisawas considered a lost cause – her place on the wall usurped by a Raphael – when, more than two years after the theft, Peruggia gave himself away.

His mistake was attempting to sell the painting to an art dealer in Florence who, with his knowledge, brought it to the second-most famous gallery in Europe, the Uffizi, to have it authenticated. In fairness, the thief’s motives had been partly patriotic. A poor immigrant in Paris, frequently insulted by the snooty natives, he railed at the perceived injustice of so many Italian masterpieces decorating the museums of an ungrateful France. If he could secure his own future, while repatriating Leonardo’s masterpiece, so much the better.

Perhaps here, as elsewhere, patriotism was the last refuge of a scoundrel. His trial heard evidence that he had previously tried to offload the painting in London. Even so, the Italian court was lenient. He escaped with a one-year jail sentence and, in the event, served little more than half of it.

The Mona Lisa, meanwhile, returned to the Louvre, her fame only multiplied by the lengthy absence. She would never again be so easily stolen, even in August. Indeed, the painting may now – belatedly – be as safe as Notre Dame's towers. Which said, in one sense, it was never recovered at all. Because except for museum staff, perhaps, nobody really sees the Mona Lisaany more.

First-time visitors are invariably surprised by how small the picture as. And sunken behind a plate of high-security glass, it’s that bit smaller. Peering at it over the shoulders of tour groups, who in August wash through the room like waves of the sea, you might as well not be there at all. In fact, many tourists wisely don’t even attempt to study the picture. They take photographs of it instead, in the hope that they can somehow experience the moment later.

Once, art lovers used to stand before the Mona Lisa, moved to tears. But you'd have to be a hyper-sensitive aesthete to experience such emotions about her now. In effect, she was kidnapped by celebrity a century ago. And despite the countless millions of tourists who have since contributed, the ransom has still not been paid off.