Giovanni Poggi, the Uffizi director who had authenticated the painting in Peruggia’s hotel room, went on to have a significant subsequent career. During World War II, he organized the emergency evacuation of Florence’s greatest art treasures to protected locations in the Tuscan countryside, a logistical operation that moved hundreds of major works within days and ultimately protected thousands of objects from the war’s destruction. The same professional knowledge and institutional commitment that had allowed him to authenticate the Mona Lisa in a hotel room in 1913 made him the right person to protect Florence’s heritage in the following decade of crisis.
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## The Louvre’s Security Failure and Its Aftermath
The theft exposed specific institutional failures at the Louvre that became the subject of considerable public comment in France.
The practice of allowing maintenance workers and tradespeople to move through the building in white smocks without strict tracking of their identities and movements was identified as a vulnerability. The lack of a systematic procedure for checking whether paintings were present and accounted for — rather than assumed to be present unless explicitly noticed missing — was another. The delay between Louis Béroud’s first inquiry about the missing painting and the official recognition of theft took most of a day, in part because no one had a protocol for responding to a potentially missing work.
The fact that Peruggia had been questioned and his apartment searched without the painting being discovered became a particular source of criticism. How had police been inside his apartment and failed to find one of the most famous objects in the world? The false-bottom trunk explanation was accepted as the answer, but it also raised the question of how thorough the initial search had been.