Vincenzo Peruggia
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Vincenzo Peruggia (October 8th, 1881 - 1947) is the man who once stole the Mona Lisa.
In 1911 when the former Louvre worker walked into the museum, saw that the room holding the Mona Lisa was empty of guards and visitors, took the painting off its pegs, went to a staircase, removed the painting from its frame, and walked out with it under his arm.
The theft may have been master-minded by Eduardo de Valfierno, a con-man who had commissioned the French art forger Yves Chaudron to make copies of the painting so he could sell them as the missing original. Because he didn't need the original for his con, he never contacted Peruggia again after the crime. This is speculative.
The story says Vincenzo hid the painting under the table cloth and when policemen came to search his apartment in Florence they signed some papers on the very table that was hiding the painting.
After having kept the painting in his apartment for two years, Peruggia grew impatient and was finally caught when he attempted to sell it to a Florence art dealer; it was exhibited all over Italy and returned to the Louvre in 1913.
Vincenzo's heirs said he did it for a patriotic reason: he wanted to bring the painting back to Italy after it was stolen by Napoleon. Even if this was what he believed, this is factually wrong since Leonardo da Vinci took this painting along when he moved to France to become court painter for Francis I. He gave him the painting as a gift.
It seems like the court agreed to some extent that Peruggia committed his crime for patriotic reasons. He was sent to jail for one year and fifteen days for what is sometimes described as the greatest art theft of the 20th century.
