On Tuesday morning, August 22, 1911, a French painter named Louis Béroud arrived at the Louvre with his easel and sketchbook. He had spent weeks working on a piece that required the Mona Lisa to be in front of him. When he found the wall where it had hung in the Salon Carré empty except for four iron hooks, he tracked down a guard. The guard assumed the painting had been taken to be photographed. Photography requests were routine. Hours passed. By early afternoon, the photographer’s workshop confirmed they had not requested the work. The museum’s director of security was called. What began as a minor administrative confusion became, by that evening, one of the most consequential crimes in the history of art. The Mona Lisa was gone. And no one could say precisely how or when it had been taken.
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## A Painting on Four Hooks
In the summer of 1911, the Mona Lisa was not on display behind bulletproof glass in a temperature-controlled gallery with dedicated security staff and admission barriers managed to control the viewing crowd. It was hanging in an open gallery room on four iron wall hooks, accessible to any visitor who walked past.
The painting at that time was approximately 30 inches tall and 21 inches wide — a wooden panel, slightly smaller than many people imagine, painted in oil by Leonardo da Vinci sometime between 1503 and 1519. It had been in French hands for roughly four centuries. It had been in the Louvre, in one form or another, for over a hundred years. It was guarded by the same general systems that protected hundreds of other works in the same building: a staff of mostly elderly custodians, iron hooks and wooden rails for hanging, and the collective assumption that no one would actually take a painting from a national museum.