Who Get’s to Decide

For more than two years, the Mona Lisa lived in a wooden trunk in a small room in Paris.

Not a reproduction. Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa.

In August 1911, Vincenzo Peruggia, an Italian glazier who had worked at the Louvre, removed the painting from the museum and carried it into the streets of Paris. The theft wasn’t even discovered until the following day.

The police searched. Newspapers around the world carried the story. Pablo Picasso was questioned. Thousands of people came to the Louvre simply to stare at the empty place on the wall. And all the while, the painting was hidden in Peruggia’s room.

Twenty-eight months later, he took it to Florence and contacted an art dealer. Peruggia would later say he believed Leonardo’s painting belonged in Italy. He was mistaken about its history, but apparently not about his ability to possess it. For more than two years, he had done precisely that.

He possessed the Mona Lisa. He did not own the…