Steal the
Mona Lisa

The Mona Lisa is not just a painting. It’s an idea. It started in August 1911, when someone carried it out of the Louvre.

Until then it was a respected Leonardo in the Salon Carré. Critics liked it. Most visitors walked right past. Vincenzo Peruggia, a handyman who had helped put in the museum’s protective glass, spent a Sunday night in a storeroom, lifted the panel off its hooks the next morning, slipped it under his smock and walked out. Nobody noticed for most of the day. The guards figured it was off being photographed.

The museum closed for a week. When it reopened, people lined up to look at four iron hooks. Kafka and Max Brod were in Paris that fall and went to see the gap. The face was on front pages for weeks; Apollinaire spent a few days in jail on suspicion, and Picasso was brought in for questioning. For two years the painting was only reproductions and rumor, and somewhere in there it became the most recognized picture in the world. Peruggia had it the whole time, in a trunk in his room in Paris. In December 1913 he took it to Florence and offered it to an art dealer, Alfredo Geri, who called the police. The painting came home with a story attached, and that story is a large part of why people still line up to see it.

Theft is where the viewer comes in.

A copy on a wall is one of millions. Once someone wants it badly enough to take it, it gets a history of its own: it hung here, someone took it, nobody knows where it went. That’s 1911 again on a much smaller scale.

Banksy got to a version of this by accident. People started cutting his pieces out of walls, and the cut-out pieces got more attention and sold for more than they would have where he left them. The shredder came later, and that one was on purpose.

The theft is up to the audience. The face is provided, and somebody else has to commit to it. Whoever takes one has made a choice nobody asked them to make, which is a stronger kind of attention than looking. Peruggia said he did it for Italy. Each new thief has a reason too, and it goes into the piece without anyone hearing what it was.

Why it’s not a copy of Leo’s version.

Leonardo painted one woman, most likely Lisa Gherardini, the wife of a Florentine silk merchant. For five hundred years hers is the face everyone copies. Duchamp gave her a mustache, and decades later Banksy handed her a rocket launcher, but the face underneath stayed hers.

Mine keep the name and the gold frame and swap out the woman. Each one is somebody else, like a comic-book face with four eyes or a TV comedian mid-gasp. They’re faces from the last hundred years, women more of us actually grew up with, put in the spot where the Renaissance one usually goes.

The title stays MONA LISA on purpose. Mona is short for madonna, an old Italian way of saying “my lady,” so it was never really a name to begin with.

Each hangs from a single nail or hook and lifts off easily, so taking one is a quick decision.

Each one gets photographed in place, then again after it’s gone. How long it lasted gets written down. A Mona Lisa that lasts three months tells you something different than one that’s gone by lunch. The first one lasted a day.

The work is a collaboration between two people, the artist and the thief, and it’s credited to both.

The artist paints the face, frames it and hangs it, and the thief finishes the job by taking it away. They’ll probably never meet, so the second name on the label stays blank.