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A hundred years ago, on 21 August 1911, an Italian painter and decorator slipped from the cupboard in the Louvre where he had been hiding all night, stepped up to the Mona Lisa, freed her from her frame and left the building apparently unseen. It was 24 hours before anyone noticed she was missing. The usual line is that the Louvre was closed for maintenance and everyone thought that somebody else must have removed the picture to be photographed, or cleaned. But museums are – or were – surprisingly blind to crime, even when it involves stealing the world's most famous painting. Or perhaps not the world's most famous painting – the Mona Lisa certainly wasn't universally known in 1911. You still had to travel to the Louvre to see her. There were prints, though Leonardo's cumulative portrait, gradually painted over several years, had long proved extremely hard to copy as an engraving. And photographs did exist – indeed the French police printed off 6,500 copies for distribution in the streets of Paris immediately after her disappearance, as if to jog someone's memory. These mug-shots were also for comparison with any forgery that might turn up purporting to be the original. For the Mona Lisa wears a fine veil of craquelure – that pattern of tiny cracks that can form in the surface of a painting when it's as old as she is – that is more or less impossible to fake. Wrinkles are her positive ID. But a century ago, the painting's fame was restricted to the west, where she had been buoyed up on clouds of romantic hype ever since Walter Pater wrote in 1869: "She is older than the rocks among which she sits, like the vampire she has been dead many times . . ." which although not exactly gallant, broadcast her strange allure to hundreds of thousands.
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