The theft that made the Mona Lisa famous

Leonardo worked on the portrait of Lisa Gherardini for years and never delivered it to the family who commissioned it. He kept it with him until his death in France in 1519, and it eventually entered the French royal collection.

For centuries it was admired by connoisseurs but was not the world's most famous painting. That changed on the morning of 21 August 1911, when it was discovered missing from its wall in the Louvre.

The thief was Vincenzo Peruggia, an Italian handyman who had worked at the museum. He hid inside overnight, lifted the painting from its frame, slipped it under his smock and walked out. Police even questioned the poet Guillaume Apollinaire and the young Pablo Picasso.

For more than two years the painting sat in Peruggia's room in Paris. Meanwhile newspapers around the world printed its face, and crowds queued at the Louvre to stare at the four empty hooks where it had hung.

In December 1913 Peruggia tried to sell it to an art dealer in Florence, who called the police. When the Mona Lisa returned to Paris, it was no longer just a masterpiece. It was a celebrity — made famous, in part, by its absence.