This deepening is real, even if it is not exactly what Leonardo or the Louvre or Vincenzo Peruggia intended. It is what happens when an extraordinary act — the theft — intersects with an extraordinary object at a moment when mass media can amplify the intersection to global scale. The result is not the painting Leonardo painted, in the sense that the experience of encountering it is permanently altered by what happened to it. It is, also, still exactly the painting Leonardo painted: the same dimensions, the same poplar wood, the same carefully built up sfumato layers, the same question posed by the expression.
Both of these things are true, and the relationship between them is part of what makes the Mona Lisa, now, the particular object it has become: not simply a great painting, but the painting around which the entire culture of thinking about great paintings has organized itself for more than a century.
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## Echoes in the History of Art Theft
The theft of the Mona Lisa has had specific echoes in the subsequent history of art theft that are worth identifying, because they show how the case established patterns that later crimes repeated.
The inside-job logic — a person with prior legitimate access to an institution using that access to defeat its security — appears in many subsequent major museum thefts. The 1990 Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum theft in Boston, in which two men posing as police officers gained entry and removed thirteen works including a Vermeer, three Rembrandts, and a Degas, was not an inside job in Peruggia’s sense but it exploited the same institutional assumption: that people who look like they belong are authorized to be there. The Gardner theft remains unsolved and the works unrecovered, making the Mona Lisa case look, in retrospect, like a relatively benign precedent.