A court-appointed psychiatrist named Paolo Amaldi examined Peruggia and evaluated his mental fitness. The specific details of the psychiatric evaluation included a riddle that Amaldi posed to Peruggia; the answer Peruggia gave contributed to the court’s assessment of his mental state. The evaluation ultimately characterized him as someone who had acted from a combination of limited reasoning, misguided patriotism, and financial aspiration rather than serious criminal premeditation.
The court’s sentence was one year and fifteen days. On appeal, the sentence was reduced to seven months and nine days. Peruggia received credit for time already served in custody and was released.
He had walked out of the Louvre with the most famous painting in the world, hidden it for over two years, tried to sell it, and served approximately seven months in prison. The leniency of the sentence reflected the specific cultural and political dynamics of Italy in 1914, the sympathy many Italians felt for his stated motive, and the psychiatric characterization of his reasoning as impaired rather than sophisticated.
It also reflected the reality that the painting had been recovered, undamaged, and was on its way back to France. The crime had a victim — the French state and the Louvre — but the victim had its property back.
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## Back on the Wall
The Mona Lisa returned to the Louvre in January 1914, nearly two and a half years after it had been taken from its hooks in the Salon Carré.
Its return was a major event. The museum that had been mocked for its security failures — that had closed for a week, that had watched visitors come to look at empty hooks, that had seen its director summoned home from Mexico to face a national crisis — received the painting back with a combination of relief and institutional embarrassment.