Original subtitles

(suspenseful electronic music)

December 1913 in Italy,

a man arrives in Florence after a 16-hour journey.

He checks into a small rundown hotel.

He's here for a secret meeting

with two of Italy's greatest art experts,

and he has something extraordinary to sell,

the world's most famous painting,

the Mona Lisa by Leonardo da Vinci.

I mean, it just takes them

a minute or two to realize, it's the one.

The Mona Lisa had disappeared

from The Louvre in Paris two years earlier.

It was one of the most incredible heists in art history,

and involved a police investigation across Europe,

a possible forgery scam in America,

and even the arrest of Pablo Picasso.

Picasso was worried about being deported,

and he was completely petrified.

It's a story

that brought the French art establishment to its knees,

and mesmerized the world's press.

(suspenseful music)

Stealing it looked so incredible,

that when they realized that the painting is gone,

it is just a real bombshell.

Not just the theft itself,

but the astonishing discovery

of who was finally responsible.

It is unquestionably the most important art theft ever.

(dramatic music)

(suspenseful music)

(light piano music)

It's Tuesday, August 22nd, 1911 in Paris.

The Louvre, France's greatest art museum

is just opening to the public.

By 10:00 a.m., one of the first visitors to arrive

is an artist named Louis Beroud.

He's come to paint his own interpretation

of the Mona Lisa by Leonardo da Vinci.

Mr. Beroud had the idea

of doing a painting representing a nice lady,

a young woman, redoing her hair in front of the Mona Lisa.

As Beroud turns to begin painting

the most famous face in The Louvre,

what he sees isn't Leonardo's 16th century masterpiece,

but an empty space.

(dramatic music)

Surprised and irritated, he goes to find a security guard

to ask where the Mona Lisa is.

The security guard doesn't seem concerned.

Someone says, "Oh maybe it's been transferred

"to a studio of the museum photographer,

"or maybe one of the keepers

"need the painting in his office."

The guard goes to look for the painting,

but it's nowhere to be found.

Nobody at the gallery had put two and two together

and thought, this picture has been stolen.

The reverential calm of The Louvre

is about to be shattered.

Moments later, the security guard

rushes back to the gallery saying, "It's gone, it's gone."

(suspenseful music)

The unthinkable had just happened.

One of the world's most famous paintings

started by Leonardo in 1503

and held in The Louvre for over 100 years had vanished.

When they realized that the painting is gone,

it is just a real bombshell.

At 11:00 a.m.,

the museum makes a frantic call to the police.

The authorities and the French government

are about to go into meltdown.

The Louvre is sealed off,

every entrance locked, and a massive search starts.

(dramatic music)

The Prefet de Police,

Mr. Lepine with the Inspecteur Principal de la Surete,

who is the head of the French Scotland Yard

and with 60 police inspectors,

and they searched the museum, they blocked the doors,

they want to interview all the people.

(dramatic music)

Inside The Louvre,

there was now mayhem, panic, and shock.

You've got something like 60 detectives

running around The Louvre interviewing everybody.

You've got probably 100 or 120 gendarmes guarding the place,

making sure nobody can go in and out.

It was unthinkable that anybody would even consider

stealing the most famous painting in the world.

It was a catastrophe.

The French art establishment was rocked to the core.

(suspenseful music)

There had been no elaborate break in,

no attacks on security, not even a previous threat.

The Mona Lisa had been stolen in broad daylight.

(light piano music)

By the early 1900s,

The Louvre already housed one of the finest collection

of art treasures anywhere in the world.

In charge of this grand institution was an elite core

of intellectuals and establishment figures.

They were very much the old guard,

appointed by the French government.

But there was colors, you know?

Art historians respected,

so it was yes,

very much part of the French establishment, yes.

But The Louvre was no stranger

to threats against some of its art.

Anonymous letters targeting specific pictures

had been sent in the last two years,

but The Louvre's top brass

dismissed these threats as cranks.

There were letters to the Austrian ambassadors saying

that a group of thieves were planning to steal it and so on.

I mean, none of this was true,

and some minor thefts had been done in The Louvre.

Statuettes, antique statuettes and so on.

So they should've then tightened the security.

(light piano music)

And in a sense you could imagine

that the authorities of The Louvre

did not take any of these particular threats seriously.

The Louvre thought

they had reason to feel secure.

They employed an army of security guards

to patrol the galleries and the main entrances,

but behind the imposing uniforms, there was deep discontent.

The guards of the museum are not professional guards,

but they are old soldiers

and they are sent by the war department.

You know, it's a kind of retirement for old soldiers

and some had been in the colonial army,

and they are bitter or some even are drunkards.

(light piano music)

They are just bored people,

and they don't really care about their job,

and they sleep most of the time

or they go away without telling the administration.

Security was very lax.

They did have security guards

who would be on duty in the various galleries,

but these weren't high quality staff.

And that wasn't all.

Crucially, there was one key day at The Louvre

when their security routine changed.

For six days a week, The Louvre was open to the public,

but every Monday,

it closed its doors for cleaning and repairs.

August 21st, the day of the theft

of the Mona Lisa was a Monday.

It was a Monday, the gallery was closed.

It had been busy the previous day,

and what would happen on a Monday

is that pictures would be moved around.

They'd take photographs for the catalogs.

There'd be a lot of people around who were workers,

who would be virtually under no supervision whatsoever.

So this Monday closing day of the museum,

they are only 10 guards for the whole huge museum, 10,

and none in the Salon Carre,

where the most prestigious Italian paintings are kept,

because they are busy somewhere else.

(light piano music)

At 6:00 a.m. that morning,

Vincenzo Peruggia, a 30 year old Italian carpenter,

leaves his small flat near the Gare de l'Est.

He had been born in Italy,

but moved to France to try to earn a better living.

(suspenseful music)

He was born in 1881, near Como in Northern Italy,

and as many poor Italian workers at that time,

he just crossed the border

and went to France to get some work.

It had been hard settling in.

His French neighbors weren't welcoming.

They didn't like the Italians,

and made withering remarks about their habits,

and even what they ate.

He's an Italian immigrant who has all the difficulties

that immigrants have in the foreign countries,

speaking the language in a faltering way,

being often abused and called macaroni

by the French because of his origin.

The French putdowns rankled Peruggia.

At first he struggled to find some work,

but eventually his skills

as a carpenter paid off handsomely.

(light piano music)

He got a very significant job in The Louvre,

since he was part of a team of four persons

responsible for installing the glass coverings

on the paintings between 1910 and 1911.

So he actually handled the Mona Lisa

with three of his colleagues to install the glass coverings.

(suspenseful music)

It's now 7:30 a.m. Monday.

Peruggia crosses the bridge and heads towards

one of the smaller side entrances to The Louvre.

Although he doesn't work here anymore,

his face is still known.

The countdown to one of

the world's most audacious art heists has already begun.

(suspenseful music)

Peruggia arrives in the Palais du Louvre,

near one of the entrances,

of the main entrances of the museum.

It's a door, which it seems unbelievable,

but the main gate of the museum, it was open.

So it's very easy, I mean you just get in

like as you would in a shop or a department store.

(suspenseful music)

Peruggia,

to all intents a worker in The Louvre,

now heads toward the Salon Carre,

the galleries are almost deserted.

(suspenseful music)

Peruggia knows the gallery.

Peruggia has worked in the gallery.

He knows that it's closed on a Monday.

He knows that there are a lot of workers around.

There's a lot of tradesmen.

He knows that security is relatively lax on a Monday.

(suspenseful music)

And he's not gonna be interrupted by members of the public

who are going to be looking at the pictures.

People are going to be doing other things.

They're not going to be focusing

particularly on the pictures.

Peruggia now enters the Salon Carre.

Of course he'll be a bit tense.

He will be nervous, but in another way he's quite relaxed.

He knows what he's doing and knows exactly what to do.

He crosses the empty gallery

and quickly starts to remove the Mona Lisa from the wall.

He'll know how big the picture is.

He'll know how heavy it is.

He will know how it's hung on the wall.

He will know how to get it off the wall,

and he'll know how to carry it around.

Peruggia walks calmly out of the Salon Carre

with the framed Mona Lisa.

He's lucky, because nobody notices him.

He's dressed as a workman,

as all the other workers doing their job in the museum.

So he's also very lucky,

but he takes advantage of this, the neglect of the museum.

(suspenseful music)

But how could Peruggia hope to get passed

the museum's security guards,

and outside with the Mona Lisa undetected?

He takes the Mona Lisa

and brings it to a small staircase nearby,

but then he hears noise from the stairs.

Somebody's coming,

so very quickly he sits down as if he was tired,

and waits until another worker has gone away.

He's got something very valuable.

He's in a very risky situation,

so he's gotta find a way of getting it out.

He probably thinks he knows how to do it.

He now methodically removes

the frame and glass covering.

He knows very well

how to undo the painting from its frame,

since he was a very man to install them the year before,

and leaves in this small staircase

the frame and the window covering.

Now he just has the 16th century painting

on a wooden board.

He covers it with a white cloth.

Then he goes downstairs to see if the door opens.

But when he gets to the door, he finds it's locked.

He doesn't panic.

Some people would just throw the picture away and run away.

He doesn't panic.

He's got the presence of mind to think it through,

and he thinks he knows.

He can get the lock off the door.

He starts to unscrew the doorknob,

but with his escape route seemingly blocked,

Peruggia is now a sitting target for the security guards.

But incredibly, his luck changes again.

At that same moment,

a plumber named Sauve who knows Peruggia walks passed.

Again, he doesn't panic.

Somebody else comes along who he happens to know,

and in fairly casual conversation,

he talks about some fool locking the door

and here is his former colleague says,

"Oh don't worry, I've got a key."

And he lets him out.

Now there's just one door left to get through.

So this gate you call Porte de Louvre,

and the day of the theft,

this is the gate that Peruggia uses

to get out of the museum.

There was a concierge as in any building in Paris

or house in Paris, you know a concierge,

and you would ring a bell to get in,

and then the concierge would pull a cord and let you in.

Strangely, when Peruggia wants to get out of The Louvre,

the door is ajar.

So he doesn't even have to ask somebody to open it for him.

So the door is open? Yes.

It's unbelievable, so he just walks out?

It's so easy.

(suspenseful music)

Peruggia now hurries

down the sidewalk beside The Louvre.

He's still not out.

The Mona Lisa is wrapped in a white cloth under his arm.

Stopping only to throw the doorknob away,

he now heads into the Paris streets.

Peruggia's route takes him

through small Parisian backstreets and home

to his one bedroom flat in Rue de l'Hopital St. Louis.

He walks up the wooden stairs to the second floor.

(suspenseful music)

It's about eight o'clock in the morning,

and now he reaches home and feels relieved.

He's done it.

Nobody has caught him.

This is where he used to live

and this is where he kept the Mona Lisa,

in a miserable room in this poor block of flats.

(suspenseful music)

One of the most famous paintings in the world

has just been stolen.

The Louvre's security guards

hoodwinked by an Italian carpenter,

but no one would know the Mona Lisa had been stolen

for at least another 24 hours.

(bright classical music)

The Mona Lisa is considered one of the greatest examples

of Italian Renaissance painting,

so how did this masterpiece end up in The Louvre in France?

We're not sure how the Mona Lisa ended up at The Louvre.

As usual, there are different theories.

One is that Leonardo took the Mona Lisa with him

when he went to the court of Francis I, the King of France,

and when he died, the painting remained there.

(bright classical music)

Another theory says that on the contrary,

he gave it to one of his scholars, one of his pupils,

and then it was bought by envoys of the King of France,

who was collecting Italian art,

and of course he would've tried

to get as many Leonardo as possible.

So this is how the painting ended up in the royal collection

and they put it in The Louvre.

By 1910,

the Mona Lisa was a celebrated painting,

but it was by no means the most famous in the world.

The Mona Lisa was not a very well known painting then.

Of course it was known

among art specialists and among artists,

and in fact there is a rather large number of copies

of the Mona Lisa painted in the 16th and 17th century,

and many imitations, and many paintings

which were executed in the style of the Mona Lisa.

So it was a well known painting,

but the crowds did not know about it.

(light piano music)

The Mona Lisa was painted on wood,

and even then her pose fascinated the public.

In the middle of the 19th century,

you already had the construction

of the myth of the Mona Lisa.

The story of the smile is enigmatic, sardonic or castrating,

and she was not just a normal woman.

She was in fact a femme fatale,

the castrating female and all the rest of it.

And so by 1911, those who knew anything about the Mona Lisa

would expect to read in the visage of the Mona Lisa

all the fantasies that the great romantics

had put upon her already

in the first half of the 19th century.

But how did Leonardo

create the mystique of Mona Lisa?

Leonardo developed new

and very extraordinary techniques in painting the Mona Lisa,

one which he describes himself, which he calls sfumato,

which literally means smoked.

That gives the Mona Lisa a sort of smoked or veiled effect.

It looks as if you're encountering Mona Lisa

through a mist as it were.

Slightly out of focus, it makes her mysterious.

It's very difficult to pin down what she's thinking.

(light piano music)

Our expression is determined largely

by the position of the corner of the eyes here,

and the position of the corner of the mouth.

We smile it goes up, we are sad, it goes down.

What Leonardo does is that he blurs the corner here,

and he blurs the corner there.

So we're not quite sure what the expression is,

and because we're not quite sure, we make it up.

We can invent, we can read what we like in it.

(light piano music)

So the so called enigmatic smile,

there's a very perceptible smile,

but we are not quite sure it is one,

and that is due to the fact

that he deliberately tried to have a painting

in which the expression remained mysterious.

And there was one more trick

that made Leonardo's masterpiece unique.

Many of the paintings or portraits of the time

were of people simply staring at you blankly.

Alternatively, and even more popular was a profile,

and so you know, it's like a police mugshot.

You don't get an awful lot of expression in there.

What Leonardo did was to have at the same time,

while the face is looking at you in a straight line,

the body is moving slightly

in a sort of like three quarter position.

It is as if Mona Lisa was sitting in

the conventional Renaissance position and someone calls her.

And so you know, she's like this completely,

and then she turns to face the person who is calling her.

So it is as if she is in a yes, a snapshot,

but she was moving.

The Mona Lisa was undoubtedly

a painting of extraordinary interest,

so it was even more amazing that 24 hours

after Peruggia had walked into The Louvre unchallenged,

no one had yet noticed it had gone.

(suspenseful music)

As night fell over Paris, The Louvre's security guards

were still blissfully unaware it had been stolen.

By Tuesday morning, still no one had raised the alarm,

despite the empty space on the wall.

It's at this point that Louis Beroud arrives

to paint the Mona Lisa, notices it's not there,

and then starts to complain to the security guard.

He says, "Well, it's at nine o'clock.

"The painting is not back to its place.

"So this is not, this is strange.

"Why don't you check with the photographer?"

So a guard sends another guard

to see if the photographer Mr. Braun has the painting

in his studio, and then it is not there either.

So they start,

but very slowly and not worrying too much about it,

to inquire with the keepers to try.

They don't know where the picture is.

The director of the gallery is not there, he's away.

He's out of Paris, so there's nobody directly in charge

who can asy definitely this is where it's supposed to be.

So there is a good deal of confusion,

not even terrible concern in the first instance.

It's just not where they thought it was.

At 11 o'clock that morning,

the terrible truth finally sinks in,

the Mona Lisa has been stolen.

Beroud realized the painting is not to be found,

and they tell the man in charge with the museum,

Georges Benedite, they tell him,

(speaks in foreign language), "She is not there anymore!"

(dramatic music)

More than 24 hours since Peruggia

staged his incredible heist, the police are called.

(sirens wailing)

At 3:00 p.m., The Louvre is closed to the public.

A frantic search begins.

(dramatic music)

But the trail is already cold.

The crucial problem for the police at the time

was that they weren't involved until a very long time

after the picture was actually taken.

(suspenseful music)

So the sense of urgency and of interviewing people

who would've been witness, that's all lost.

We're then into an investigation

where people's memories are a bit hazy.

Yes, they maybe saw somebody around,

but they didn't really pay any notice.

So that 24 hours is absolutely crucial.

It's also crucial in the sense

that he's gone, the picture's gone.

Within hours,

the police make a dramatic discovery.

The frame and glass are found hidden on the staircase.

By 5:00 p.m., the theft is headline news.

The Louvre, now shut indefinitely,

is left facing a public outcry

and a monumental national disaster.

They would've been completely horrified,

and in very much alarmed for their reputation.

In fact, the director immediately resigned.

He was on holiday at the time.

There was an enormous amount of press coverage,

especially by the popular press.

So it was not an internal matter.

It was not something you could hush up,

and indeed even the French cabinet,

the government met and discussed

this great loss to French culture and museum life.

Traumatized, the museum clings to the hope

that it might just be a stunt.

Stealing it looked so incredible, that to most people,

I mean it looked like a joke from somebody,

maybe a journalist who would just then point out

how negligent the administration of the museum was.

But other theories come in thick and fast.

(light piano music)

The fear that some maniac may have taken the painting

to himself and might damage it or even destroy it.

But Peruggia had left one vital clue,

the frame and the glass casing on the stairs.

In order to get the picture out of the gallery,

he has to take it out of its case and out of its frame,

and that's a bit risky.

It's risky in the sense that he might damage the picture,

but it also means he's got to be out of sight

while he does that, and he's got to physically,

got to get hold of it.

So he is likely to leave some clues,

and we do know that in actual fact,

he does leave a very clear identifiable thumbprint.

(suspenseful music)

The French police, under huge public pressure,

now turn to the man they hoped had the skills

to track down the thief, Alphonse Bertillon,

a brilliant forensic scientist.

Alphonse Bertillon was crucial really,

to the development of criminal records

and systematic criminal records in France

at the end of the 19th, beginning of the 20th century.

He was absolutely central to the whole French system.

French police under Alphonse Bertillon,

had just started pioneering

a new technique in solving crimes.

They were looking elsewhere.

The French had tended to use a system

which essentially worked on very precise measurements of

people who were caught and convicted of criminal offenses.

And although they had fingerprint technology

and accepted the fingerprint evidence,

this was regarded very much as secondary to what was called

anthropomorphic measurements that they preferred.

Having worked at The Louvre,

Peruggia was a potential suspect.

What's more, he already had a police record.

We know that he had been arrested twice,

in 1908 and then the year later.

The first time he was drunk and tried to rob a prostitute,

and the other time he tried to steal pipes

on a building work or something like that.

I mean it was very menial, but he had been arrested

and sent to prison for a few days for these two things.

(suspenseful music)

His criminal activities

before the theft were pretty pathetic.

I mean, he did try once to mug a prostitute

and she sort of smashed him back,

and he was arrested and spent some time in jail.

So not the master criminal,

which so many accounts of art theft enjoy describing.

He was fingerprinted,

and his records had been kept on file.

But there was a crucial flaw

in the way police did their fingerprinting in 1911.

They would've been very sophisticated in the sense

that they would have very precise measurements

of the distance between your eyes,

the length of your forearm, the size of your hands,

the size of your ears, and things of that nature.

They would've had very precise records

of tattoos, scars, and other marks,

but they would only have kept records

of right hand fingerprints.

They didn't keep full sets of fingerprints,

because that reflected the relative lack of importance

that they gave to fingerprint identification.

They've got his fingerprints on record.

They find a fingerprint on the frame,

but it's a left thumbprint,

so the fingerprint in a sense is useless.

Convinced it was an inside job,

the police had now interviewed over 200 Louvre employees,

but had gotten nowhere.

Along the way though, they had made a terrible blunder.

Incredibly, they had forgotten to interview

the team of four workers who had been making the glass

to protect the Mona Lisa and other paintings.

Among them, was Vincenzo Peruggia.

They forget about the company who is responsible

for putting the glass coverings on the masterpieces

of the museum, and this is a shame really,

because they had been told by one of the keepers

of the museum that they should check

on the people responsible for the job,

they just forget about it.

So they interview almost everyone,

except the very persons who have been the closest

to the Mona Lisa before the theft.

It was now a month

since the Mona Lisa had been snatched

from under the noses of The Louvre's top brass.

The police investigation was going nowhere.

But within days, the investigation took a dramatic new twist

and the theory of it

being an inside job went out the window.

Two new names suddenly came to the police's attention.

They were anything but ordinary suspects.

One was a poet, the other an up and coming Spanish artist

who would in time change the face of modern art.

Pablo Picasso was a young artist

living in Paris at the time.

He was yet to become world famous,

but his work was highly regarded.

Amongst his circle of friends,

was the French poet Apollinaire.

He was in this gang of poets.

It was called the band of Picasso,

and he and Apollinaire were great friends.

I mean they were in a way, they were rather naughty.

They actually sort of considered themselves

to be a bit above the law, really.

A bit sort of, that they could do anything.

Paris in the early 1900s

had a reputation for extravagant dealings in art,

and for some it was a chance to make money,

not always the honest way.

A mutual friend in Picasso's group

had decided to steal some small Egyptian statuettes.

Unbelievably, they had been on display in The Louvre.

It had been easy enough.

Now he offered to sell them to Apollinaire, who accepted.

But when news of the stolen Mona Lisa

broke some months later, Apollinaire realized

the stolen statues could make him a suspect.

Apollinaire was terrified,

once the theft of the Mona Lisa was revealed,

that he would be somehow implicated with the theft.

But the trail of the stolen statues

was about to get even more intriguing.

Apollinaire had also offered

one of the statuettes to Picasso,

who knew nothing about them being stolen, until now.

He went to Picasso and said,

"I think I should just get rid of the statuettes,

"throw them in the sand."

Picasso alarmed said,

"You can't throw works of art in the sand.

"I mean for God's sake, just take them to the police."

Both of them were convinced the police in Paris

would trace the statues back to them.

They were now in a tight corner.

Apollinaire went to the police station

and gave himself up, and he basically I think confessed all.

Now then, Picasso then went on to the police station,

and he,

to his great shame,

he just completely pretended he didn't know Apollinaire.

Apollinaire looked at him, he was in handcuffs,

and he was absolutely a broken man,

and Picasso just looked passed him and he said,

"I don't know who that man is."

On September 11th,

Picasso was questioned by the police.

He protested his innocence.

First of all, the whole thing had been a joke,

but then this began to be very scary indeed.

Remember, he was petrified of being deported,

and he, I think it really did affect him.

It was an astonishing turn of events,

but it was clear neither of them

had anything to do with the theft.

The police investigation had to look elsewhere.

(bright music)

(light piano music)

Still living in his sparsely furnished flat in Paris,

Peruggia stuck to his normal daily routine.

Normal, apart from one thing.

The Mona Lisa was still headline news,

and Peruggia was understandably nervous

about keeping it in his flat all the time,

but that wasn't the only reason.

Peruggia now needed a favor from a friend.

He knew another Italian on the same street.

The Mona Lisa was about to move again.

One of his friends called Michele Lancellotti,

is also a neighbor and since the inside of Peruggia's room

is not heated, so it's getting damp. (laughs)

He's worried because this man

is very careful not to damage the painting.

He's worried that it could be damaged with the damp,

so he asked Lancellotti to keep the painting in his room.

So Lancellotti has nothing to do with the theft,

but he actually kept the painting

for maybe one month or two in his room.

So we've gone from a position where

he's the only person in the world who knows he's got it,

to a position where somebody else knows,

and however much you trust somebody else,

the history of criminal inquiries is littered with cases

where trusted accomplices have let people down.

So he's at that point very, very vulnerable,

and remarkably lucky, given the hue and cry

that there is around Paris at the time,

that his friend who is a fellow Italian probably shares

some of his disdain or dislike of the French,

and either doesn't realize what he's got hanging on his wall

or is in the same sort of mindset as Peruggia,

and isn't really gonna tell

the French authorities anything anyway.

For two years, little more was heard about

the police investigation into the theft of the Mona Lisa.

Vincenzo Peruggia kept a low profile,

but he was still in Paris.

We don't know much about him during these years.

At some stage, he leaves the company,

the glass company he was working for.

He went on strike or something,

and then we don't know much.

We don't know anything about him.

But then on the 29th of November, 1913,

a letter postmarked in Paris arrived in Italy.

It was addressed

to a well known Florence art dealer,

Alfredo Geri at Borgo Ognissanti,

and intriguingly signed Leonardo.

(Angelo speaking in foreign language)

Geri was without doubt,

one of the most important antique dealers in Florence

at the end of the 19th century

and beginning of the 20th century.

He belonged to a very select group of art connoisseurs

specializing in historical Italian paintings.

(Angelo speaking in foreign language)

Peruggia had spotted an ad Geri had placed

in the newspapers offering to buy works of art in Italy.

He had written letters to other art dealers in Europe,

but no one had replied, until now.

(suspenseful music)

He writes to this Italian Florentine antique dealer,

saying, "This is,

"I'm selling the Mona Lisa."

He calls himself Leonardo, (laughs)

and the man is rather intrigued by this letter,

think of maybe throwing it away,

but mentions it to the director of the Uffizi museum,

and the man says, "Just in case, answer this letter."

Incredibly, the letter offered

the return of the Mona Lisa for the Italian nation.

No money was mentioned,

but the letter writer said he was poor and needy.

There was something about the letter, the story,

it was worth having a look anyway,

and maybe it was not the Mona Lisa,

maybe it was another painting important.

Even a copy of the Mona Lisa

in the 17th century would be quite a remarkable find.

So the instinct is, well, let's go and have a look.

By return post,

Leonardo is invited to come to Florence.

At his flat in Paris, Peruggia takes the unframed Mona Lisa

on a wooden board and packs it into a trunk.

(light music)

Arriving at the Gare de l'Est,

he buys a third class train ticket for Florence.

For the first time in over 300 years,

the Mona Lisa is about to leave France.

(whistle blows)

Packed into a battered trunk

and vulnerable to even the slightest damage,

Leonardo's masterpiece

is about to endure her final indignity.

(bell chiming)

By the time Peruggia arrives in Florence, it's night.

Tired after his long journey, he walks to the city center.

(suspenseful music)

Finally, he books a room

in this small hotel on the Via Panzani.

The Mona Lisa is pushed under his bed in the trunk.

The next morning, Peruggia would've woken to the sound

of the bells from the Duomo.

The opportunity he's waited two years for

is almost within his grasp.

To steady his nerves, he walks through

the center of Florence and across the Palazzo Vecchio,

pausing briefly to gather his thoughts.

His meeting with Alfredo Geri and Poggi

is just one hour away.

Finally, he goes back to his hotel.

What's about to happen in this small room in Florence

will go down in history.

So you can imagine Vincenzo Peruggia

being in a rather poor hotel for poor people,

and these two gentlemen, one is a famous art dealer,

the other one is the curator of the Uffizi,

one of the most important art gallery in Italy.

And then they go to his small room, small hotel room,

and under the bed there's the wooden box,

and in the wooden box, personal belongings of Peruggia,

and even a mandolin. (laughs)

Then he takes off the bottom planks of the box,

and wrapped in a piece of fabric,

here is the Mona Lisa,

and the two men know from this instant

that this the real one.

I mean, it's not a copy.

It's not an imitation.

This is the one.

He shows them the painting everybody's been looking for.

The painting has a very, very tiny craquelure

as the French call it, little cracklings,

which is due to the oil painting

having dried over the centuries.

They have pictures of it, a photograph.

This is like having the fingerprint of the painter.

You cannot imitate

all the thousand and thousand of little crackling.

It just takes them a minute or two to realize, it's the one.

Having established it's the real painting,

they now lay a trap for Peruggia.

So they convince Vincenzo

that they are going to bring back the painting

and put it in the Uffizi so that Italian people

can see their pride and joy once again.

They leave the hotel with the painting,

only to be stopped by the concierge of the hotel

who suspects them of having stolen one of the artworks.

You can imagine the kind of artwork

which would be in the rooms there.

They show the concierge that,

"No, no, it's not.

"It doesn't belong to the hotel, it's just this."

The concierge looks at it,

obviously does not recognize the famous painting,

and says, "Oh, that's alright then."

And off they go, and they call the Carabinieri,

who shortly afterwards arrest the poor Vincenzo Peruggia.

Peruggia is finally charged and sent to trial,

but for many, what was truly astonishing

wasn't just the theft itself,

it was that the Mona Lisa, painted on wood,

had survived without cover or protection

in a shabby trunk for over two years.

I think the great merit

or the great luck of Vincenzo Peruggia

is that he was able to do all that,

that he has removed the painting from the frame,

from the glass, take it, steal it,

take it to his room, change the room.

Then in the middle of winter,

go on third class train compartment

and all the way to Florence,

and nothing happened to the painting.

When you think that the painting now,

it is the most ultra protected painting in the world,

kept in a box at The Louvre with a silicone gel,

and all sorts of mechanisms to ensure

that there is not the slightest change in temperature,

to make sure that the wood will not crack.

Well, Peruggia was either very skilled or lucky, or both.

At his trial, Peruggia was convicted

and sentenced to one year and 15 days.

He told the court his motive

for the theft was purely nationalistic.

He wanted the Mona Lisa to hang in the Uffizi Gallery,

in company with other

great Italian Renaissance masterpieces.

(light music)

(Angelo speaking in foreign language)

Even at the time,

I don't think people thought of him as a hero.

They thought of him more as a stupid person,

a thief, a small thief.

(Angelo speaking in foreign language)

But he did get some sympathy,

because his justification was to return the picture to Italy

and he'd taken it in such a naive way.

(Angelo speaking in foreign language)

But in the end,

he did have to spend a year and 15 days

in the prison in Florence,

which is a very old and grim prison.

(Angelo speaking in foreign language)

But as Peruggia languished in jail,

his dream finally did become a reality, albeit briefly.

The Mona Lisa was exhibited

in the Uffizi Gallery for one month.

(Angelo speaking in foreign language)

The painting was put exactly here

in this corner on a small easel facing the wall.

(Angelo speaking in foreign language)

So the painting was here,

and the line of people following the normal route

through the gallery would end up here,

and be able to admire Leonardo's masterpiece.

(Angelo speaking in foreign language)

(light music)

One month later,

she was returned to The Louvre in triumph.

(Angelo speaking in foreign language)

In a sense,

the sadness of the loss of the Mona Lisa is not so great

when you consider that

there are a great many Italian works of art

which remain in private collections today,

which were taken from us during the Napoleonic era.

(Angelo speaking in foreign language)

So for us Italians,

the sale of the Mona Lisa to France

is not such a national tragedy,

because there were so many Renaissance paintings

which have been if you like, stolen.

(Angelo speaking in foreign language)

(light music)

But that wasn't the end of the story.

20 years later, an extraordinary new twist came to light.

A twist that if true,

would cast real doubt on Peruggia's role

as the nationalistic fanatic acting alone.

In 1931, an American journalist Karl Decker published

an interview he made with a man called Eduardo de Valfierno.

Decker was told he could never publish this

until Valfierno died.

Valfierno was a conman and art dealer.

He aimed high, and sold old Spanish masters

to private wealthy clients.

According to Decker, Valfierno had set up business

with a talented art restorer called Yves Chaudron.

Valfierno ever the opportunist,

had an idea to use Chaudron for his ultimate con,

forging the Mona Lisa,

but it would be a tough challenge.

Well, Leonardo's method of painting,

or the method of painting

that was employed during the Renaissance,

was very particular and very,

actually very complicated and careful.

It would've taken him four to five years

to master the actual craft of painting.

His technique would've been fairly innovative for the time,

but certainly it would've been very careful

and involved a high degree of preparation.

All of the pigments would've had to have been ground by hand

using a pestle and mortar, and then mixed with the medium,

whether that was egg white, egg yolk, or oil.

You would paint an area, let it dry,

paint it with very, very thin brushes, let it dry,

and then paint again on top,

building it up layer upon layer.

A lot of the beauty of the Mona Lisa,

and some of Leonardo's other paintings,

depends on this painstakingly slow technique, which he used.

It took him four years to paint the Mona Lisa.

By 1910, Valfierno has asked Chaudron

to paint another five copies of the Mona Lisa.

Valfierno had himself been busy.

He had started to contact wealthy clients

who might be interested in owning

the world's greatest picture.

Valfierno's fakes were now ready

to be shipped across the Atlantic.

Five were stored in a warehouse in New York City,

the sixth went to Buenos Aires.

But who could possibly believe

they were about to own the world's greatest painting,

when the real thing was still in The Louvre?

Well, I think that you know,

any plan to forge the Mona Lisa would've been

an extremely brave and ambitious one,

given the difficulties involved of replicating the painting

to a convincing effect.

But one has to remember that in 1910,

a good deal of the world would not have seen the Mona Lisa.

Travel was not so easy and one couldn't just nip across

to The Louvre and have a look at the original.

People were less familiar

with what the Mona Lisa actually looked like.

So it's conceivable I think,

that if the copy was of a high quality,

that perhaps people who were not so familiar

with the original might've been fooled

into thinking that it really was the Mona Lisa.

According to Decker,

Valfierno now put his master plan into action.

He set about trying to find someone to steal the Mona Lisa.

The press coverage would be worldwide,

and his clients would now believe

they really were going to own da Vinci's masterpiece.

He could then go to potential owners, and he could say,

"You know the Mona Lisa was stolen six months ago?

"Well, I've got it,

"and you can have it for a significant amount of money."

And of course, the potential buyers

couldn't possibly talk to anybody else about it.

So, the fact that there were five or six of these forgeries

in existence would never be revealed,

certainly not revealed within people's normal lifetimes.

Valfierno's meal ticket

was a young Italian carpenter

who already worked at The Louvre, Vincenzo Peruggia,

but Peruggia wouldn't be the only robber that night.

According to Decker,

he would also have two accomplices with him,

hired by Valfierno.

You must understand that the solo Vincenzo Peruggia

was a terrible disappointment

for people who like a good art story.

The thief must be a gentleman thief,

who must be an art connoisseur, who must love art.

There must be an American millionaire in the background,

prepared to pay extraordinary sums just to look at

the Mona Lisa in his large villa or house,

and instead, what do we get?

We get this rather ignorant, almost illiterate man.

But Valfierno had one more trick up his sleeve.

Once Peruggia had gone to Florence

and tried to sell it in Italy,

the Mona Lisa of course returned to The Louvre.

Once the forgeries have been sold,

even if the original is recovered,

there is never any suspicion going to fall

upon the person who sold the forgeries,

who was behind the original theft,

because that person can always go back

to his buyers and say,

"Well, of course they can't admit

"that they've not got it back, so they had a copy made."

The Valfierno connection was never verified,

and some are skeptical that it ever happened.

Well, one would need some kind of evidence that

that has actually occurred.

Now, it might have been difficult

to find any evidence in 1915 or 1920,

but by now surely, the copies which are in the vaults

of these millionaires would've come out.

Whenever someone says, I have the real Mona Lisa.

It's in my attic, it's in my basement,

and anyone would look at it,

it's pretty obvious that it doesn't look at all

like a Renaissance painting.

There's one very bizarre incident.

It's a good one,

of course there's not the slightest evidence for it.

(bright music)

Valfierno died in 1931,

and Decker's secret interview with the conman

known also as the Marques, was published that same year.

But what's never been disputed, is Peruggia's role

in possibly the greatest art heist of all time.

Peruggia was released from prison

and was welcomed back to his hometown in Italy, a hero.

Two months later, it's the First World War.

He fights in the war

in the Italian troops,

and then after the war, goes back to Paris,

and he died in the '20s, we don't exactly know when,

in this suburb of Paris, completely unknown and forgotten.

But as it turned out,

Peruggia was to have his last moment of fame.

When he died, he had obituaries in all the Italian papers

as the man who stole the Mona Lisa,

which is not bad for a poor Italian immigrant.

The theft of the Mona Lisa

was an extraordinary worldwide event,

but even more extraordinary

was that it had been carried out successfully

by a poor immigrant Italian carpenter

who kept the most famous painting in the world

by his bed for over two years.

But it is an extraordinary story,

since we know that the painting was already so famous.

So to be able to steal such a thing,

I mean it's a symbol of, I don't know,

of European culture disappearing suddenly,

and with the fear that it can be destroyed by a madman.

So I mean, it's really, this story is unbelievable.

(suspenseful jazz music)