This provenance history matters for the Peruggia case because his stated motive — returning the painting to Italy, where it belonged, from France, where Napoleon had stolen it — was factually incoherent. Leonardo da Vinci had taken the painting to France himself. The French royal family had possessed it legally for centuries. No act of Napoleonic looting was involved. When Peruggia made this argument in court in 1914, prosecutors pointed out the historical record. Many Italian observers were initially sympathetic to him regardless, but the patriotic justification rested on a false premise.
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## Already Famous
The prompt for this article specifically notes the need to examine the Mona Lisa’s fame before 1911 without claiming it was obscure. This is a distinction worth making carefully, because two contradictory popular myths exist about the painting’s pre-theft status.
One myth holds that the painting was completely unknown before 1911 and that the theft invented its celebrity from nothing. This is not accurate. The other myth holds that the Mona Lisa was already the universally recognized icon it is today before the theft occurred, and that the 1911 crime simply confirmed an existing status. This is also not fully accurate.
The reality is more interesting than either myth.
By the late nineteenth century, the Mona Lisa had developed a substantial reputation among artists, writers, and educated European audiences. The Romantic era had transformed how the painting was discussed and perceived. Writers including Théophile Gautier and Walter Pater had described the sitter in vivid, even extravagant terms — Gautier calling her “a strange being” with a gaze “promising unknown pleasures,” Pater famously describing her in terms of vampiric timelessness in an 1869 essay that influenced generations of readers. The same era had mythologized Leonardo himself as an archetypal Renaissance genius, which raised the perceived stakes of everything attributed to him.