The response to the theft — the crowds at the empty wall, the newspaper coverage, the false arrests, the theories, the eventual relief at recovery — was the response of a public coming to terms with the idea that something they had thought was permanently theirs could simply be gone. The experience changed what the painting meant. The painting that came back to the Louvre in January 1914 was the same object that had been taken in August 1911, but it was perceived differently. It had earned, in its absence, a significance that its presence alone had not fully generated.
That is the lasting consequence of the theft of the Mona Lisa. Not the crime itself, which was straightforward in its mechanics and limited in its sophistication. But the two and a half years in which one of the world’s most significant works of art was in a trunk in a Paris apartment, and the world didn’t know where it was, and no one could do anything about it.
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## A Note on the Myths This Case Generated
No account of the Mona Lisa theft is complete without addressing the persistent myths that the case has generated and that continue to circulate in popular accounts.
**The Valfierno forgery conspiracy**: As noted above, this story — in which a Argentine con man named Eduardo de Valfierno orchestrated the theft to sell forged copies — rests entirely on a 1932 posthumous claim by an American journalist named Karl Decker and has no independent documentary support. It is not an established account of the theft. It is an entertaining story of uncertain origin.