The white smock system — uniform workwear for maintenance personnel — that allowed Peruggia to move through the building without attracting attention reflected a broader institutional logic: authorized personnel moved freely, unauthorized personnel were assumed not to be present. There was no systematic verification of worker identity against an approved list at entry points on maintenance days. Workers came and went as the work required.
The specific fingerprint failure — Peruggia’s prints on file, his name on the suspect list, the administrative gap between them — reflected the state of forensic record-keeping in 1911 rather than incompetence unique to the French police. Fingerprint identification was a tool that worked well when records were organized and systematically cross-referenced; the systems for doing this were still being developed. The Bertillon system, which organized identification records by physical measurements, was France’s established approach and was more systematically organized than its fingerprint equivalent at that point.
The Louvre’s response after the theft — tightening entry controls, increasing staff presence, reviewing procedures for accounting for major works — was real but limited. The institution continued to operate on the assumption that the 1911 theft was an extraordinary event rather than a demonstration of a category of vulnerability that required structural response. That structural response came later, piecemeal, over decades, driven by the cumulative pressure of the 1911 theft, the interwar period’s anxiety about cultural property, and the second World War’s wholesale movement and destruction of art across Europe.
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## Leonardo’s Last Years and the Painting’s Journey to France
The story of how the Mona Lisa came to France is worth telling in more detail than the basic outline, because it is a story of one of the most remarkable transitions in the history of Western art — and because Peruggia’s misunderstanding of it was foundational to his stated justification for the theft.