114 years ago today, on August 21, 1911 (June 27, 1911), the famous painting "Mona Lisa" was stolen from the Louvre. At the beginning of the last century, the famous painting "Mona Lisa" was stolen. After a brief closure, the Louvre Museum opened to the public again. The theft of "Mona Lisa" was finally solved. Behind this miraculous theft was actually a well-calculated fraud. How "Mona Lisa" was taken out of the Louvre Museum. On August 21, 1911, it was a Monday. As is customary, the Louvre is closed, and only a few staff members walk around the hall. The famous museum has a large collection, and the "Mona Lisa" is placed in the square salon. Piquet, the Louvre's maintenance director, passed by on his morning tour. He told aides that it was the most valuable painting in the Louvre, worth 1.50 million francs. As he left, he glanced at his watch, which pointed to 7:20. Shortly after Piquet left the square salon, the door of a niche opened and a man walked out. He had been hiding in the niche the day before, and the Louvre has many such hidden niches, which are usually used to store easels and canvases. The man was wearing a white smock, which is always worn by the Louvre's maintenance staff. He went straight to the Mona Lisa and took it off. The frame size itself weighs 18 pounds, and as is common in the Renaissance, the Mona Lisa is painted on three thick planks. A few months ago, the museum took some physical measures to protect the painting: a large wooden stand and a glass-paneled box, totaling 200 pounds. But the heavy "Mona Lisa" was only attached to the wall with four hooks. The museum's explanation is that it is convenient to remove in the event of an accident such as a fire. The thief successfully removed the "Mona Lisa" and hid the painting in his work blouse. He left without showing his feet. The only trouble was in the stairwell on the ground floor. The thief opened the door with a key, but could not open the door. He heard someone coming downstairs and removed the door handle with a screwdriver in a hurry. Downstairs was Sowett, a plumber at the Louvre. He was the only person who had seen the thief in his true colors. He later recalled that he had indeed seen a man in a white smock complaining about the lack of a doorknob. Sowett helped him open the door with a pair of pliers. The thief slipped away calmly through the main exit of the museum. Only one security guard was assigned to that exit that day, and the security guard went AWOL again to clean the front hall. Only one passerby saw a man walking on the sidewalk with a white cloth-covered package. The witness noticed that he had dropped a metal object on the side of the street. When Piquet passed the square hall again at 8:35, he found that the Mona Lisa was not on the wall. "They moved it," he told his assistant. "Maybe they thought we were going to steal it!" Until Tuesday, when a painter complained to the security guard that "Mona Lisa" was not where it should be, the security guard shrugged: "Probably for the photography studio." The painter asked when it would be returned. The security guard went to the photographer, but the photographer said he didn't take it, maybe he cleaned it. Finally, the security guard thought it would be best to inform a supervisor, so the frantic search began, and finally they found out: "Mona Lisa" is lost! " Two years after the disappearance of the patriot thief Leonardo's Mona Lisa, the Italian collector Alfredo Gerry received a letter in Florence from a man who identified himself as Leonardo and said he had the Mona Lisa. Leonardo, who described himself as an Italian patriot, was driven by a strong desire to return national treasures and was determined to "steal" at least one of Napoleon's stolen treasures - the fact is that the Mona Lisa was taken to France long before Napoleon was born. He also mentioned that although he would not "sell" the Mona Lisa at a high price, he, as a person with negative equity, would not refuse the state's compensation for a patriot. Gerry looked at the address of the sender, which was a post office box in Paris. Gerry took the letter to Giovanni Porchi, the director of the Uffizi Gallery in Florence. Porchi had a set of pictures from the Louvre that detailed the markings behind the original "Mona Lisa" plank. This is a place where the forger is unlikely to notice. Soon, Gerry received a telegram signed by Leonardo, who claimed to be in Milan and arrived in Florence the next day. That day, a thin, neatly dressed man appeared in Gerry's gallery. Gerry expressed moderate concerns about authenticity. Leonardo, the "patriot", reiterated that what they were trading was the real thing, which he had personally "taken out" of the Louvre. But Leonardo was vague about the details of the theft. While inspecting, Gerry found the Louvre number and stamp on the back of the Mona Lisa. He was thrilled, but forced himself to calm down, he suggested that the Mona Lisa needed to be further inspected at the Uffizi Gallery. By comparing the fine cracks in the Mona Lisa photographed by the Louvre - small cracks caused by weathering and aging in specific locations are difficult to imitate - the museum finally concluded that this was the Mona Lisa stolen from the Louvre. But for Leonardo, it was the beginning of disaster, and shortly after he returned to the hotel, two police officers arrested him. Leonardo did not expect that the two upright celebrities would call the police soon after he left the Uffizi Gallery. Previously, they had warmly held his hand and congratulated the patriot on his return to the national treasure. The Italian Parliament returned the Mona Lisa to France after a heated debate, and on Jan. 4, 1914, the Mona Lisa returned to its original place in the Louvre. The thief, Leonardo, was originally named Vincenzo Perugia, an Italian immigrant to France who worked as a painter at the Louvre from 1910 to 1911. In the end, he was sentenced to one year and 15 days in prison. In January 1914, just a few months before the trial of Leonardo began, the American journalist Carl Decker met Valfierno, a fraudster, in a bar in Casablanca, North Africa. After years of selling fakes, the guy had mastered the market for fakes from Buenos Aires to Paris. Valfierno had been selling fakes of the Mona Lisa as early as 1910, when a newspaper broke that the Mona Lisa had been stolen, but the Louvre came forward to clarify it. This put Valfierno and his accomplices in an awkward position. The real Mona Lisa had to be stolen from the Louvre so that his client could be sure he was getting the "real stolen" from the museum. At this point, the cunning liar had another idea. Since theft can justify one fake painting, it can also justify six paintings. So Valfirno made six more copies, with the intention of distributing them at the right moment. As for stealing paintings, Valfirno said: "It's a piece of cake. The staff in the Louvre in white smocks will never be suspected." He recruited Leonardo because he knew the Louvre's secret rooms and safe passages for employees to enter and exit. Leonardo was not alone, and he had two accomplices who helped remove the paintings from the walls. The only flaw in the plan was that Leonardo did not try the stairwell key that Valfirno had given him. He could not open the door, so he removed the handle, and the scene that appeared at the beginning of this article appeared. Soon after news broke that the Mona Lisa had been stolen from the Louvre, the six fakes were sold to the United States. In 1963, in Washington, the United States, American children saw the famous Mona Lisa for the first time.