It was the beginning of installation art. One hundred years ago, when the Mona Lisa was stolen from the Louvre museum in Paris, people formed queues to see the space, where the painting of the woman with the enigmatic smile had hung, according to dpa. Their fascination was with the gap on the wall - although paintings still hung either side - and reflected the universal shock at the disappearance of what was already one of the world's best-known paintings. Just a few weeks before, the director of France's national museums, Theophile Homolle, had laughed off the prospect of the Louvre being hit by thieves. "You might as well pretend that one could steal the towers of the cathedral of Notre-Dame," he had scoffed. In fact, pilfering Leonardo Da Vinci's Renaissance masterpiece required little than a lot of pluck and a white smock, as Vincenzo Peruggia, a 32-year-old Italian immigrant, who had previously worked at the Louvre, discovered. On Sunday evening, August 20, 1911, after all the visitors had left the museum, Peruggia stowed away in a storage closet for the night, waiting for his chance to pounce. Early the next morning, after an elderly security guard had passed on his rounds, Peruggia lifted the small 53x77 cm painting off its four hooks, discarded the frame and shoved the wooden panel on which Da Vinci had painted, under his smock. As he made for the exit, Peruggia probably thought he was home free. But there was one last obstacle to overcome: a locked door. With a screwdriver he took off the knob. But it took a helpful plumber to come along and unlock the door, believing Peruggia to be a fellow maintenace worker, because of his smock. It was the nearly perfect crime, bar for a fingerprint on the wall. But, although Peruggia had previously been fingerprinted by police, they had only taken his right hand. As luck would have it, the incriminating print was from his left hand. For the next two years, Peruggia kept Lisa Gherardini, the wife of a rich Florentine merchant who is believed to be the woman in the 16th-century painting, hostage in his one-room apartment in the proletarian north-east of Paris. The Financial Times, in an article on August 5, reports that a detective visited the apartment, but didn't spot the painting, which Peruggia kept mostly under his bed. By December 1912, the Louvre had given up the Mona Lisa for dead and filled the gap with a bearded nobleman painted by another Italian Renaissance master, Raphael. When, in December 1913, police finally caught up with Peruggia in Italy, where he tried to flog the Mona Lisa to Florence's Uffizi gallery, the thief claimed he had been acting out of patriotism. He wanted to return to Italy a painting "stolen" by Napoleon's troops, ignoring the fact that the painting had been legally acquired by French King Francois 1 over two centuries before Napoleon's troops entered Italy. Plus, according to the Financial Times, Peruggia had, by his own account, which he later recounted, also at one point tried to sell the painting in England. And yet, the patriotism card - together with Peruggia's claims that he had suffered discrimination in France, where he was called a "macaroni" - did earn him a measure of sympathy in Italy, where he was sentenced to just seven months and nine days in jail. Much as he had felt slighted by France it was to France he returned after World War 1, where his death at the age of 44 in 1925 went largely unnoticed. Mona Lisa's fame, by contrast, endures more than 500 years after her birth. Every day thousands of people flock to see her at the Louvre, where she hangs on a purpose-built wall in the middle of a room, behind bullet proof glass, with at least one guard either side to control the crowds that congregate three-deep to contemplate her. While some enjoy trying to interpret her inscrutable smile - is it a prim smile, is it knowing, maybe even mocking? - many feel, well, underwhelmed. "I expected something huge," Rey Arroyo, a 28-year-old American in checked shirt, shorts and a backpack, told the German Press Agency dpa. "In school they were always telling us how great she is." A young security officer, part of the team that guards the painting, was also unmoved. "I think he (Da Vinci) did better," she said.
