The trial’s character — the psychiatric evaluation, the reduced sentence, the widespread Italian press commentary that treated the defendant with a degree of sympathy — reflected this emotional complexity. The court was operating in a country where much of the public press had, in the days after the December arrest, treated the story as an adventure story with a patriotic protagonist rather than a simple criminal prosecution.
The prosecutor’s presentation of the financial evidence — the letters about “making his fortune,” the 500,000 lire demand — was important in complicating the patriotic narrative. But the defense’s argument about Peruggia’s sincere if misguided belief in his own patriotic mission was also not easily dismissed. The court’s resolution — a sentence that acknowledged criminality while reflecting genuine mitigation — was, in its way, a legal reflection of a genuinely ambiguous cultural moment.
By the time the sentence was handed down, the world had moved on. Austria had assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand. Within weeks of the trial’s conclusion in June 1914, Europe was at war. The Mona Lisa theft — which had been the most intensely covered story in the European press for two years — was immediately superseded by events of an entirely different scale.
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## The Painting and Its Doubles
The Mona Lisa has been copied more times than any other painting in the history of Western art. This fact long predates the 1911 theft, but the theft gave it a new dimension.
During Leonardo’s lifetime and in the years immediately after his death, copies of the painting were made by other artists who encountered the original or reproductions of it. The Prado Museum in Madrid holds what is believed to be a workshop copy made at approximately the same time as the original — probably by one of Leonardo’s assistants — that shows the painting in an earlier state, before the varnish layers that have darkened the original accumulated over centuries. This copy, when examined with modern imaging techniques, provides information about the original’s earlier appearance that the original itself no longer shows as clearly.