Word: lisa
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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What we know is this: In the early morning hours of a Monday morning, before the Louvre was opened for visitors, Mona Lisa was stolen by a thief who acted quickly when no guards were around. The theft didn't even come to light until the next day. (Guards who noticed that the painting was missing assumed it had been removed to be photographed.) Once museum officials realized the truth, the Louvre was shut down. Police arrived to question the staff, re-enact the crime and dust for fingerprints, a new crime-fighting technique in those days. The French border...
...French press. Before long, Pieret had implicated Apollinaire in the thefts. When police arrested Apollinaire, he admitted under pressure that Pieret had sold the pilfered works to none other than Picasso. Thinking they had found their way into a crime ring that might be behind the Mona Lisa case, the cops then dragged Picasso before a magistrate for questioning...
...court, he almost certainly knew at the time that both heads were lifted from the Louvre. He may even have pushed Pieret to take them in the first place. But prosecutors couldn't build a case that either Picasso or Apollinaire had stolen the heads, much less the Mona Lisa, and both of them went free. After that, for years the trail went cold. Mona Lisa was reported to have been shipped to Switzerland or South America. She was in an apartment in the Bronx, a private gallery in St. Petersburg or a secret room in the mansion...
...whole episode proved embarrassing for France. Peruggia had escaped the dragnet of French police, despite the fact that he had once worked at the Louvre, knew the exits and escape routes and had even helped build the glass-enclosed frame Mona Lisa was displayed in - so on the fateful morning he knew how to get her out of it quickly. Then he spirited her back to his shabby apartment and flung her like Patty Hearst into a dark closet, which is where she remained for more than two years...
Though there's evidence that Peruggia tried repeatedly to sell the picture, he always insisted that his only motive in stealing Mona Lisa was to return it in glory to Italy and to exact revenge for Napoleon's massive theft of artworks all across Europe. One problem: Mona Lisa had never been part of the Napoleonic plunder. Though Leonardo had begun the painting in Florence in 1503, he took it with him to France 13 years later when he resettled at the court of the French king François I. After his death there in 1519, the painting passed...