What is certain is that the painting was declared genuine and was placed on display in Florence without immediate restoration work being announced. Its return to the Louvre in January 1914 and its subsequent public display suggest that the conservators and officials who handled it in Florence found it in condition suitable for travel and display.
The painting has been extensively analyzed with modern imaging technology in the decades since: X-ray examination, infrared reflectography, and multispectral imaging have revealed the underdrawing, the stages of Leonardo’s revisions, and the state of the paint layers at considerable depth. These analyses have contributed to the scientific understanding of the painting’s construction and condition but have not revealed any significant damage attributable to the period of Peruggia’s concealment.
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## The Trial as Cultural Event
The trial of Vincenzo Peruggia in Florence in June 1914 was a legal proceeding, but it was also something else: a public drama that allowed Italian society to process the complicated feelings the case had generated.
The complexity of those feelings was genuine. Peruggia had stolen a painting from France. That was a crime. But he was an Italian immigrant laborer who had worked in Paris, been treated as one of the invisible workforce on which the city’s maintenance depended, and had taken a painting that his countrymen could plausibly — if historically inaccurately — feel had been wrongly in France for centuries. The patriotic framing, however factually flawed, resonated with real cultural tensions.
Italy in 1914 was a country still consolidating its national identity after the unification completed in 1871. The question of Italy’s cultural inheritance — where Renaissance masterpieces belonged, who had the right to claim the artistic legacy of Leonardo, Michelangelo, and Raphael — was not an abstract question. French museums held many works produced in Italy. British museums held more. The idea that the Mona Lisa’s presence in France represented an injustice to Italy was emotionally available to Italian audiences even when they understood that the specific history Peruggia cited was inaccurate.