Vincenzo Peruggia

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Vincenzo Peruggia

Vincenzo Peruggia (born October 8, 1881 in Dumenza , Varese province , Italy , † October 8, 1925 in Saint-Maur-des-Fossés ) was an Italian art thief who stole the Mona Lisa from the Louvre in 1911 .

Life

Peruggia, who came from Dumenza in Italy , lived in France as a house painter (he preferred the term decorative painter ) and occasional crook. Peruggia was convinced that the Mona Lisa belonged in her Italian "homeland" and therefore had to be brought back.

After planning the action for a long time, he stole the work of art on August 21, 1911. He knew the Louvre from a previous job as a glazier; Among other things, he was concerned with the attachment of protective glass in front of important paintings and their framing and brought it to great skill. He gained access through the employee entrance in a white coat. On the selected day, a Monday, the Louvre was also closed to visitors and therefore only a few staff in the building. In addition, there was the holiday season in Paris, so that the disappearance of the painting was only noticed after 24 hours. To get out of the Louvre again, he first unscrewed the handle on a locked door of a side entrance and then asked a plumber who happened to be passing by to open the door for him.

Peruggia let an offer from a Parisian magazine for 55,000 francs, which the thief should receive if he returned the work of art before September 1st, pass. He then kept the picture hidden for two years in his accommodation on rue de L'Hôpital-Saint-Louis. Even during a routine check of all glaziers who had recently worked at the Louvre, the picture was not found. Despite having no alibi for the day in question, Peruggia was able to answer all of the police officer's questions and was therefore not investigated further.

For two years the search for the thief at home and abroad was in vain. On November 29, 1913, the Florentine antique dealer Alfredo Geri received a letter from "Vincenzo Leonardo, Paris, Place de la République , poste restante" in which the Mona Lisa was offered for sale. Geri thought it was a joke and only accepted the offer on the advice of his friend Giovanni Poggi , the director of the Florentine Uffizi Gallery . On December 10, 1913, Geri met Peruggia in Florence , who demanded 500,000 lire (which in 2009 was worth around 1.5 million euros) to cover his "expenses".

The next day Geri and Poggi examined the picture of Peruggia in the Hotel Tripoli on Via Panzani. There the dealer and the museum director verified the authenticity of the painting by checking the inventory number (No. 316) of the Louvre and by comparing the cracks and agreed to buy it on December 12th. They then immediately informed the police, so that Peruggia was arrested and the artwork was seized.

Before the painting was returned, it was exhibited in Florence, Rome and Milan . On December 31, 1913, the painting returned to the Louvre.

With the help of a psychiatric report, Peruggia were granted extenuating circumstances in court. A few days before the trial on June 4 and 5, 1914, the psychiatrist Paolo Amaldi (1865–1956) asked the defendant: “There are two birds sitting on a tree. If a hunter shoots one of them, how many stay in the tree? ”“ One! ”Replied Peruggia. “Insane!” ( Deficiente! ) Thundered the doctor - the correct answer would have been “none”, as the other would have flown away. Peruggia was sentenced to only one year and 15 days in prison. Upon appeal by his defense attorney, the sentence was reduced to seven months and eight days. Since he had already spent this time in custody, he was able to leave the court as a free man.

In Italy, Peruggia was celebrated like a national hero. After his release, he served as a soldier in the Italian army in the First World War . After the war he returned to France and opened a paint shop in a village in the Haute-Savoie department . He later married and had a daughter. He died on his 44th birthday in 1925 of lead poisoning in Saint-Maur-des-Fossés and is buried in the Condé cemetery. His daughter Celestina, born in 1924, and her two children supported a documentary by documentary filmmaker Joe Medeiros about Vincenzo Peruggia and his motives for stealing the Mona Lisa in 2008. Celestina Peruggia died in 2011.

The French journalist and art historian Jerôme Coignard researched the theft for years. He considered it unlikely that Peruggia would have come up with the idea of ​​theft on his own and went public in 2011 with theses that a certain Otto Rosenberg (* 1868) from Cologne had instigated Peruggia to act. Rosenberg was known as a petty criminal and gambler and was already part of the large group of suspects back then.

Effect on criminology

The theft revealed the flaws in the Bertillonage identification technique that had been common in France until then , in which people were identified on the basis of body measurements and not, as is common today, on the basis of fingerprints. Peruggia had left his fingerprints on both a pane of glass and a doorknob . They had already been registered since 1909, but could not be found in the thousands of index boxes sorted by body size. When this weak point became known, the end of Bertillon's system was sealed, after dactyloscopy had already proven itself to be the better system in other cases.

Artistic reception

The painting's robbery and media attention from the two-year search went a long way towards promoting its fame.

In 1931 a German comedy about the theft of the Mona Lisa was made with the title Der Raub der Mona Lisa with Willi Forst in the role of Vincenzo Peruggia.

The story of the theft was also filmed by Michel Deville in 1966 under the title The Thief of the Mona Lisa , in which George Chakiris played the thief.

In 2006 Fabrizio Costa produced the film L'uomo che rubò la Gioconda for Italian television . In this Alessandro Preziosi took on the role of Peruggia.

In 2015 the Kleine Theater Berlin brought the play "The Raub of the Mona Lisa" to the stage as a "musical crime comedy based on a true story".

Web links

Commons : Vincenzio Peruggia  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. a b c d e f g h i Gerhard Feix : The great ear of Paris - cases of the Sûreté. Verlag Das neue Berlin, 1975, pages 183–194
  2. Sassoon, Donald. Da Vinci and the secret of the Mona Lisa. From the English by Cornelia Panzacchi. Gustav Lübbe Verlag, Bergisch Gladbach 2006, pp. 214-217 ISBN 978-3-7857-2232-9
  3. Who stole the Mona Lisa? , FT.com, August 2011, accessed November 12, 2013
  4. Mona Lisa is gone! (No longer available online.) ARD , January 11, 2014, archived from the original on January 12, 2014 ; accessed on January 11, 2014 . Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / programm.ard.de
  5. Joe Medeiros: MONA LISA IS MISSING (formerly The Missing Piece) An award-winning documentary about Vincenzo Peruggia & the theft of the Mona Lisa - CELESTINA PERUGGIA 1924 - 2011. March 14, 2011, accessed January 11, 2014 .
  6. Coignard Une femme disparaît. Le vol de la Joconde au Louvre en 1911, Paris, Le Passage, 2010
  7. Peter Kropmanns When the Mona Lisa saw her home again, FAZ, August 21, 2011