The prime suspects
were as shocking as the crime.
Pablo Picasso and Guillaume Apollinaire, the young provocateurs of the modern art movement, were arrested for the theft.
No story so captured the imagination of the world.
Tthe public felt her loss as emotionally as an abduction or a kidnapping.
Thousands flocked to the Louvre to view the empty space on the museum wall.
Thousands more were glued to every installment of the missing person story.
Global attention lifted Mona Lisa out of the museum and made her the people’s painting—the lost love of the nation and the world.
More than two years later, when Mona Lisa was presumed gone forever, a letter signed "Leonardo" led police to her.
Mona Lisa was recovered in Florence, just a few blocks from the house where Leonardo da Vinci had begun painting.
From THE INTRODUCTION
The mystery of Mona Lisa begins in Paris at the end of the Belle Époque, when the city was poised at the cusp of an irreverent new century and an irreverent new art. In the brief avant-guerre interlude before trench warfare and unutterable loss, a burst of glorious incandescent energy made the City of Lights electric. Extraordinary young talents in many mediums from many nations trooped to Paris to perform their high-wire acts: the Russians Diaghilev and Stravinsky, the Italian Modigliani, the Spaniards Juan Gris and Pablo Picasso, and the man without a country Guillaume Apollinaire....
Paris then was as critical to the future of art as Florence was in the Renaissance, and the preeminent painter of each period—the celebrated master Leonardo da Vinci and the brash young contender Pablo Picasso—became central players in a crime so brazen and so brilliant that it would capture the attention of the world.
A century later, the mystery lingers, the truth as elusive as the prize. Who stole Mona Lisa?
