Had the fingerprint comparison matched Peruggia’s name in the first weeks, the subsequent search of his apartment might have been conducted with more thoroughness, more resources, and more time. Whether that more careful search would have found the painting under the false bottom of his trunk is not knowable, but the probability would have been higher than it was for the initial search conducted on a person not seriously suspected.
The near-miss quality of the investigation — the right suspect questioned and released in the first weeks — has been the subject of considerable retrospective analysis. It represents one of the genuinely consequential administrative failures in the history of criminal investigation: a case where the right answer was in front of the investigators and the systems available to them failed to connect the evidence they already had.
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## Peruggia’s Life in the Margins of History
The historical record of Vincenzo Peruggia’s life before and after the theft is thin, and the thinness is itself informative.
Before the theft, he was invisible in the historical record except for the documentation that his arrest created: the fingerprint record, the name on the Louvre workers’ list, the residency registration in Paris that was standard for Italian immigrants. He was one of tens of thousands of Italian workers who had migrated to France in the early twentieth century following economic opportunity, one of thousands specifically in Paris, one of hundreds who worked at large institutions doing maintenance and construction.
He had no artistic education in any formal sense. He had no documented interest in Renaissance painting, no record of visiting museums for aesthetic rather than professional reasons, no cultural position from which to appreciate what he was stealing beyond the monetary value that press coverage had assigned to it. He knew the Mona Lisa the way a maintenance worker knows any notable object in a building where he has worked: as a thing that other people consider important.