But none of those subsequent cases has had the same cultural consequences. The reason is that the Mona Lisa was already the most culturally significant painting in France — and arguably in the Western world — by the time it was stolen. Stealing it generated consequences commensurate with its significance. Had Peruggia taken a different painting off the hooks in the Salon Carré, the case would have been a curiosity rather than a transforming event.
The theft of the Mona Lisa mattered because the Mona Lisa was already the Mona Lisa. The crime that was supposed to make Peruggia rich instead made the painting, which was already famous, into the most famous painting in the world. The irony is complete, and it is an irony that Peruggia — who died a forty-four-year-old in the suburbs of Paris, having spent his most significant contribution to history hiding in a trunk — may or may not have recognized.
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## The Painting Now
The Mona Lisa today is experienced differently from the way any previous generation experienced it. It is behind bulletproof glass, in a dedicated room, behind a barrier that keeps visitors several meters away. The room is climate-controlled. The lighting is managed. The crowds are enormous — approximately eight million visitors per year to the Louvre, with a substantial portion of them coming specifically to see the painting.
The experience of standing in front of the Mona Lisa in the twenty-first century is, for most visitors, one of strange dislocation. The painting itself is smaller than most people expect — thirty inches by twenty-one inches, familiar from reproductions at every scale but now encountered at its actual modest dimensions. The bulletproof glass introduces a reflection that competes with the painting’s surface. The crowds mean that most viewers spend only a few minutes in front of it before moving on. The ubiquity of cameras and phones means that many people experience the painting primarily through their screens even while standing in front of the original.