Part 1 - Grand Theft Museum - The Biggest Burglaries in History
Sunday morning, the Louvre lost priceless treasures in seven minutes. This isn't the first time. These are the stories that came before.
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This Sunday, 19 October 2025, at half past nine in the morning, a four-person commando gained entry to the Louvre via a cherry picker, cut through the windows of the Galerie d’Apollon with an angle grinder, smashed two high-security display cases and made off with eight imperial jewels in precisely seven minutes.
Among the haul: Empress Eugénie’s diadem set with nearly 2,000 diamonds, Queen Marie-Amélie’s sapphire necklace containing 631 diamonds, and Marie-Louise’s emerald necklace with its 1,138 diamonds. Empress Eugénie’s crown, composed of 1,354 diamonds and 56 emeralds, was found damaged near the museum. The criminals vanished on scooters. The museum has closed its doors.
This spectacular theft revives a question: how can priceless works disappear from the world’s best-guarded institutions? The history of major museum heists offers a troubling answer. For over a century, audacious individuals have defied security systems, sometimes with disconcerting ease. Here are the robberies that have marked the art world.
1911, Paris: The Mona Lisa Vanishes from the Louvre
On Monday morning, 21 August 1911, Vincenzo Peruggia walks through the empty galleries of the Louvre. He wears the white smock of the employees. Nobody notices him. At 29, this Italian glazier has already worked here, installing glass protections over the paintings. He knows the place by heart.
Around seven o’clock, Peruggia finds himself alone before the Mona Lisa in the Salon Carré. The portrait of Mona Lisa is not yet the icon it will become. It is a renowned work, certainly, but of middling fame. Its modest size makes it easy to handle. A determining criterion.
Peruggia unhooks the painting. He carries it into a service staircase. There, hidden from view, he removes the glass panel he himself installed. He takes the wooden panel from its frame. He slips the painting beneath his smock. A few minutes later, he leaves the museum calmly through a service door. No alarm sounds. In 1911, the Louvre has no electronic security system. Only a handful of guards watch over the rooms. This Monday morning, they are few and far between.
The theft is not discovered until 22 August. A copyist looks for the painting, sees an empty space. A guard finds the abandoned frame in the stairwell. The French government offers 40,000 francs as a reward. The museum remains shut for a week. Unprecedented.
Guillaume Apollinaire features briefly among the suspects. Pablo Picasso too. The police question them briefly. No evidence links them to the theft. The investigation stalls. For two years, the public flocks to the Louvre to contemplate a bare wall. This absence gradually transforms the painting into legend.
Peruggia lives in a modest flat in the 10th arrondissement. He hides the Mona Lisa in a false-bottomed trunk beneath his bed. In September 1911, an inspector comes to question him at home. Peruggia had worked at the museum. But the officer does not search under the bed. The thief keeps the masterpiece for over two years. His stated motive is not money. He considers himself a patriot returning the painting to Italy. He believes Napoleon plundered it. False: Leonardo da Vinci brought it to France in the service of Francis I in the sixteenth century.
In December 1913, Peruggia contacts a Florentine antiques dealer, Alfredo Geri. He signs his letters “Leonard”. He claims to possess the Mona Lisa. On 10 December, he unrolls the canvas before Geri and the director of the Uffizi. They authenticate the original. They convince Peruggia to leave them the painting for examination. The police intervene immediately.
The painting is exhibited triumphantly at the Uffizi. Then Italy returns it to France. On 4 January 1914, the Mona Lisa comes home to the Louvre welcomed by an immense crowd, to the sound of a military brass band. Peruggia is sentenced in Italy to just over a year in prison, reduced to seven months on appeal. He is released the day after the verdict. In his home village, many regard him as a naïve patriot.
This theft did more for the painting’s glory than any critic ever could. Through the investigation’s media coverage, Mona Lisa’s face entered the global collective imagination. Leonardo would doubtless have been surprised to see this portrait become an object of worldwide devotion because of a burglary.
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1934, Ghent: The Mystic Lamb Disappears
On 11 April 1934, a guard at Saint Bavo’s Cathedral in Ghent discovers that a panel from the Ghent Altarpiece has vanished. This fifteenth-century polyptych, a masterpiece by the Van Eyck brothers, is a cornerstone of Flemish heritage. The stolen wing depicts the Just Judges.
The following day, a ransom of one million Belgian francs is demanded. As proof of good faith, the abductor returns another panel he had also removed. The Church and the State refuse to pay. In November 1934, a man named Arsène Goedertier confesses on his deathbed to being the thief. But he dies without revealing the precise location. He leaves only a cryptic note.
Despite searches spanning decades, the panel has never been recovered. It remains missing to this day, replaced by a copy. This unsolved theft endures as one of the most celebrated mysteries in the history of stolen art.