The theft of the Mona Lisa in 1911 was one of the most famous cases of its day. as James Morton explains, it also helped usher in the forensic use of fingerprinting

Was it Aldous Huxley who said of La Gioconda that she had the smile of a woman who had just eaten her husband for breakfast? Now it seems that the Mona Lisa has a new home in the Louvre, possibly to allow for more people to see, if not study, the most famous and favourite painting in the world, certainly since the publication of Dan Brown’s The DaVinci Code.


But along with a number of other famous paintings, the Mona Lisa has had a troubled life. In her case, she was stolen from the Salon Carré in the museum on 21 August 1911 – a theft that had wide-ranging political repercussions. René Castellari, the chief of the Sureté (the police) later wrote: ‘Gone she had, removed from the gilt frame in which she reposed so neatly that it betoken the work of a skilled hand.’


The painting was the only piece taken and, naturally, there was speculation that it had been stolen to order for a deranged millionaire to gloat over. There was, at the time, a gang robbing museums and galleries throughout France, so there was also speculation that it was behind the theft. A third suggestion was that it had been stolen on the orders of the Kaiser – and the liner, the Kaiser Wilhelm II, was searched in New York after a rumour that the painting had been smuggled on at Cherbourg. The French government offered the massive sum of £25,000 for La Gioconda’s return.


And, as is usual, in came the claims for the reward money. Castellari, in charge of the hunt, was lured to Ghent on the pretext that the painting could be bought back by him through a dealer, Emil de Caen. In fact, it was a scam and de Caen was later sent to prison for a lengthy period. His colleagues were never caught. After a year, the hunt died down and the deranged millionaire theory became more likely.


In fact, the denouement was very simple. Twenty-seven months after the painting was stolen, it was offered to a Florentine art dealer, Alfredo Geri, by the thief, an Italian house painter called Vincente Perugia, who had worked at the Louvre.


Geri reported the proposed purchase and Perugia was arrested. Apparently, he had spent the Sunday night hiding in a small room in the museum. The next morning he unhooked the painting from the wall, and on a staircase cut it from the frame. He had come to a locked door but simply unscrewed the doorknob and left.


Perugia kept the painting under his bed in a room on the Rue de l’Hôpital Saint Louis for a little over two years before he began to try to sell. His defence was one of patriotism. He had wrongly believed the picture had been stolen by Napoleon and he wanted it returned home. In fact, it had not been a spoil of war. Da Vinci had brought the painting to France and sold it to François I for four thousand gold coins. Much more likely is that Perugia wanted the equivalent of £25,000 from Geri. At his trial in June 1914, he was described by a doctor who examined him as ‘a harmless lunatic defective in reasoning power’ and he received a year and 15 days’ imprisonment.


The real victim of the fallout was Alphonse Bertillon, who in the late 19th century had done so much to develop a system for identifying criminals. He had devised a method of taking measurements of the nose, ears, eyes and so forth and, rightly claiming that the odds of two criminals having two of the same height were four to one, If a second measurement was taken the odds lengthened to 16 to one and if there were 11 identical measurements the mathematical probability was staggering. This was his so-called portrait parlé.


At the same time, the science of fingerprinting was being developed. Fingerprinting itself was nothing new; however, the problem was not matching two sets of prints but of classifying the prints taken into some sort of index to facilitate the match. Through the efforts of Sir Francis Galton, an index system was devised and, in its first year in use, more than 1,700 convicts were identified.


Still, Bertillon clung to his own method and was only reluctantly persuaded to embrace fingerprinting, preferring his portrait parlé. By the time of the theft of the Mona Lisa, more and more countries were turning to fingerprinting and away from Bertillon, but, rather than offend their national treasure, the French authorities were reluctant to adopt wholeheartedly fingerprinting and were maintaining a mixture of both.


In fact, the theft of the Mona Lisa could have been solved in a matter of days because Perugia had left a fingerprint on the discarded frame. In 1909, he had been arrested over the theft of a handbag from a prostitute and his prints had been taken. Unfortunately, by then Bertillon’s files had become far too cumbersome to search properly. The matter was hushed up by the resourceful chief of police of Paris, Louis Lépine, but it hastened the embracing of identification by fingerprints. Bertillon died a blind and broken man, of pernicious anaemia, on 13 February 1914. And, as we know, fingerprinting went on its now virtually unchallenged way.


James Morton is a former criminal law specialist solicitor and now a freelance journalist