The art of lifting a masterpiece

RISING early on the morning of Monday, August 21, 1911 to be there the moment the gallery opened, Vincenzo Peruggia donned his white smock and headed out into the sunshine. Wearing the same clothes as the other workmen, he attracted no attention as he purposefully made his way along the corridors to his chosen room. Finding no one around, he set to work. A few minutes later, Peruggia walked out of the front doors of the Louvre with the Mona Lisa up his smock.

At first, guards didn't realise the painting was missing. It was only when visitors spotted the four metal pins in the wall that the alarm was raised. Even then, and although Peruggia had left a thumbprint at the scene, theories abounded as to the fate of Leonardo da Vinci's masterpiece. One suggested that the gallery was covering its tracks after accidentally destroying the painting, another claimed La Gioconda was still in the Louvre, hiding behind another painting.

Hundreds of suspects, including Pablo Picasso, were questioned, but police got no nearer to catching the thief, or to recovering the world's most famous work of art. As time passed, the assumption was that the Mona Lisa had been installed in a lavish apartment for the private admiration of a wealthy but unscrupulous art-lover. In fact, the canvas, freed from its frame, was stashed in a trunk at Peruggia's lodgings in Paris.

Two years later, Geri, an art-dealer in Florence, received a letter from someone calling themselves 'Leonard', proposing to sell him the picture. The dealer was inclined to dismiss the letter as a prank, but for some reason decided to show it to the director of the city's Uffizi Gallery, one Professor Poggi. Poggi advised Geri to write back, inviting Leonard to bring the picture to Italy.

A reply came almost immediately, arranging a meeting in Milan, but before the allotted date, Leonard telegraphed to change the meeting to Florence. Two days later, Geri and Professor Poggi met Leonard at the Albergo Tripoli hotel. Leonard took the dealer and the professor up to his room and pulled out a rough wooden box.

Emptying out a bundle of clothes and boots, he pulled out the false bottom and lifted out the Mona Lisa. Peruggia told Geri and Poggi that he was Leonardo da Vinci and had stolen his own painting so he could restore it to Italy. He was arrested and the painting returned to the Louvre.

To widespread astonishment - and to considerable embarrassment on the part of the gallery and the police - the thief was revealed not as a lover of high art, who had executed an elaborate plan to steal and retain the masterpiece, but as a 32-year-old Italian whitewasher, with a grudge against the French.

Two years before the theft, Peruggia had worked at the Louvre, and became increasingly bitter at the way the gallery proudly displayed the masterpieces of the Italian Renaissance, the Mona Lisa foremost amongst them. His feelings were not helped by the taunts from his French work colleagues: he claimed they called him a 'macaroni eater'. When he left the Louvre, he determined that he would restore at least one painting to his home country.

Although the Mona Lisa had long been admired as the pinnacle of Leonardo's art, it was its disappearance which secured its celebrity. Thousands of people queued to see the empty space left on the wall - more than had admired the real thing in the previous two years, inspired not so much by the painting itself, as by its place in the world.

Peruggia may not have conformed to the conventional image of the gentleman art thief, certainly not Cary Grant in Hitchcock's To Catch a Thief, but nor was he typical of the modern reality.

The theft of Leonardo's Madonna with the Yarnwinder, from Drumlanrig Castle in Scotland this week, is just the latest in a long line of art crimes, as gun-runners, drug-dealers and international crime syndicates recognise the lucrative pickings to be made.

For these criminals, a Renaissance masterpiece is not a priceless object to be admired, but just another commodity which can be exchanged for cash. Many of these paintings will be exchanged for drugs or guns. Initial theories after the theft in Scotland were that it may have been a bungled heist, with the thieves not realising they would not be able to sell it to a bona fide collector in this country.

Insurers pay out between £300-£500m a year on works of art stolen in Britain, and as one of the world's major art markets, many of the stolen paintings come through London. Paintings as high-profile as the Drumlanrig Leonardo will never find their way onto the open market - more likely they will be sold to a private collector, uninterested in putting them on private display.

But not every theft is for personal gain. Paintings by Picasso, Van Gogh and Gauguin were stolen from Manchester's Whitworth Gallery in April this year, but just days later they were found in a cardboard tube outside a public lavatory. A note found with them read: "We did not intend to steal these paintings, just to highlight a breach in security," although it is also possible that publicity over the crime gave the thieves second thoughts.

But there's no doubt that art remains one of the most sought-after targets for thieves. The Art Loss Register has a database of 140,000 stolen objects, from paintings to antiques. Some of them may be kept under wraps, until the furore over their disappearance has quietened down enough for them to be discreetly sold. Some of them may have been damaged or destroyed before the thieves could benefit from their heist. Some of them may be hanging on a wall, hidden from general view and seen by only a handful of people, never again to be admired by the public. They may still be worth millions, but their value has been lost.

The catalogue of crime

That icon of T-shirts and bedroom walls, Edvard Munch's The Scream was stolen from the National Art Museum in Oslo in 1994. It was recovered three months later by detectives, who had offered £300,000 for the work in a sting which saw the arrest of the Norwegian thieves.

Titian's Rest on the Flight to Egypt was stolen from the Marquess of Bath's Longleat home in 1995. It was recovered last year, after the Marquess reportedly paid a £100,000 reward after putting an advert in Exchange and Mart.

The Concert, one of a handful of surviving paintings by Jan Vermeer, was stolen from a museum in Boston in 1990. Worth around £50m, it was one of 12 works taken in the biggest art heist of the century, also including a Goya and a Monet, when thieves posed as policemen to gain access to the museum during St Patrick's Day celebrations. It has not been seen since.

Paintings worth more than £1m, including a Turner watercolour and two works by Sickert, were taken from the City Art Gallery in York four years ago. Two men armed with a sawn-off shotgun tied up four members of staff before cutting the canvases from their frames. Craig Townend, who had stored the paintings on top of his wardrobe, was jailed for 15 years. His accomplice was never caught, but all the artworks were recovered.

Young Man, painted by LS Lowry on a visit to Wearside, was stolen from the Sunderland Museum and Art Gallery in 1998. The postcard-sized painting, worth around £10,000, has never been recovered.

On Millennium Eve, thieves broke into the roof of Oxford's Ashmolean Museum and set off a smoke bomb to obscure the security cameras, before making off with Cezanne's Auvers-sur-Oise, valued at £3m.

Using just a ladder, a large piece of cloth and a rope, thieves entered the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam in December last year and stole two of the artist's earliest works: Congregation Leaving the Reformed Church in Nuenen, and View of the Sea at Scheveningen.