**The Week — “Stealing the Mona Lisa.”** https://theweek.com/articles/481790/stealing-mona-lisa — Investigation detail: fingerprint evidence; doorknob in ditch; December 1912 Raphael hung in empty space; painting considered lost; trial began June 4, 1914; sentence one year fifteen days reduced to seven months nine days; Peruggia’s London approach to Duveen; pre-1911 visitor behavior including 1910 suicide in front of painting.
**The Collector — “How Did Vincenzo Peruggia Steal the Mona Lisa?”** https://www.thecollector.com/how-did-vincenzo-peruggia-steal-the-mona-lisa/ — Accomplice detail: Vincenzo and Michele Lancelotti mentioned as possible co-participants; false-name used by Peruggia (“Leonardo Vincenzo”) in Geri approach; Potsdam blinded-lab replication not applicable here.
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## The Newspapers and the Story They Told
The coverage of the Mona Lisa theft in the press of 1911 was unlike anything the art world had previously generated. Newspapers in France, Italy, the United Kingdom, Germany, and the United States devoted extensive front-page attention to the case — not just on the day the theft was announced but across the weeks and months that followed. Every development, however small, was reported. Every theory was aired. Every false sighting was treated as potentially significant.
The *Le Petit Parisien* and *Le Figaro* in France devoted enormous space to the case in the days following the announcement on August 23. The *New York Times* reported the theft the same week under a headline expressing French public indignation. *The Times* of London covered the investigation with the seriousness it would have given a major diplomatic event. Italian newspapers, once the painting was recovered in Florence, treated the story as a cultural and national triumph.