By the second half of the twentieth century, those questions had evolved substantially. The 1970 UNESCO Convention on the Means of Prohibiting and Preventing the Illicit Import, Export and Transfer of Ownership of Cultural Property established international frameworks for addressing cultural property claims. Subsequent decades saw the development of art restitution programs, the return of objects looted during the Nazi period, and ongoing negotiations between source nations and acquiring institutions over works collected under colonial conditions.
The Mona Lisa was not implicated in these debates in any direct sense — its provenance from Leonardo to the French crown and from the crown to the Louvre was clear and legal. But the cultural conversations the theft generated contributed to the broader public awareness of questions about cultural ownership that those subsequent frameworks addressed. The story of Peruggia’s false history — his claim that Napoleon had stolen the painting from Italy — made concrete the kind of provenance dispute that many people might not otherwise have thought about.
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## The Mona Lisa and the Problem of Fame
There is a philosophical paradox embedded in the Mona Lisa’s fame that the theft brought into focus: the painting is now so famous that it is almost impossible to see clearly.
What this means, in practical terms, is that the person standing in front of the original in the Louvre is not, in any straightforward sense, encountering the painting for the first time. They are encountering it in the context of everything they already know about it — the smile that is discussed everywhere, the reproductions that have appeared on mugs and postcards and T-shirts, the parodies by Duchamp and Warhol and a thousand subsequent artists, the stories about the theft and the recovery, the debates about the sitter’s identity, the scientific analyses that have revealed underdrawings and earlier compositional states.