Vincenzo Peruggia

Vincenzo Peruggia (1881 - 1947) is the man who stole the Mona Lisa.

In 1911 when a 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 Leonardo da Vinci painting went missing for two years until the thief, Vincenzo Peruggia (who became an Italian national hero of sorts), tried to sell it. The buyer went to the police.

The story says Vincenzo hid the painting under the table cloth and when policemen came to search his apartment they signed some papers on the very table that was hiding the painting.

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. He was actually wrong since Leonardo da Vinci took this painting along when he moved to France.

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.