In 1911, an Argentine confidence man allegedly paid a carpenter to steal the Mona Lisa from the Louvre, sold six forgeries to six private buyers for $300,000 each, and disappeared before the investigation had a name to investigate.
On the morning of August 22, 1911, a painter named Louis Béroud arrived at the Salon Carré in the Louvre with his easel, intending to copy Leonardo da Vinci’s most celebrated portrait. The space where the Mona Lisa had hung for years was empty. Four iron hooks remained in the wall. Nothing else.
He assumed it had been removed for photography. The staff assumed the same. It took 28 hours for the most prominent art museum in the world to understand it had been robbed. When that understanding arrived, France reacted as though a national monument had been destroyed. Police sealed the museum and questioned more than 60 members of staff.
The government launched an official inquiry. Pablo Picasso was briefly considered a suspect.For 28 months, no one found the painting.
And during those 28 months, a man who called himself the Marquis de Valfierno had almost certainly already been paid.
A Ruined Heir Turned Art Forger
Eduardo de Valfierno was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, in 1850, the son of a wealthy landowner. He grew up accustomed to the lifestyle that money produces and spent freely, first from his allowance, then from his inheritance. By the time the fortune was gone, Valfierno had tastes he could no longer afford and debts he could not cover.
He sold the family art. Then he began selling art that was not the family’s to sell. He discovered that buyers with money and privacy concerns were not difficult to find. From there, the trajectory was straightforward: forged works, fraudulent provenance, a client base that could not complain to authorities without confessing to what they had attempted to purchase.
He moved to France, where the art market was vast and the appetite for private acquisition was considerable. He adopted the title of Marquis, presenting himself as a nobleman of the old world and dealing in fraudulent works to collectors who wanted masterpieces they could never display. He was good at it. He had practiced for years.
What he devised in 1910 was not a forgery scheme. It was an architecture.
Valfierno Found His Forger and His Plan
Sometime around 1910, Valfierno approached a French art restorer named Yves Chaudron with a proposal. Chaudron’s life outside this story is almost entirely undocumented. What accounts exist describe him as a skilled and meticulous craftsman, capable of reproducing Renaissance works with materials and methods convincing enough to survive scrutiny from a buyer who, for obvious reasons, would never be seeking formal authentication.
Valfierno asked Chaudron to make six copies of the Mona Lisa.
Over 14 months, Chaudron produced them, working in the period styles of the 16th century, using wooden panel preparation methods that would suggest antiquity to a buyer who could ask no questions. By the time the copies were complete, Valfierno had already identified his six clients: private collectors willing to pay $300,000 each for what they believed would be the genuine stolen article. Each was told the same story. A theft would be arranged.
Once the painting was confirmed missing from the Louvre, delivery would follow. Payment was required in advance.Six buyers agreed. Six payments were made.Valfierno had collected the money before the theft occurred. All he needed now was for the Mona Lisa to disappear.
Peruggia Lifted the Painting in Ten Minutes
For the theft itself, Valfierno recruited Vincenzo Peruggia, an Italian carpenter born in the province of Varese in 1881. Peruggia had worked at the Louvre in 1908 as part of a crew installing protective glass cases over the museum’s paintings, including the Mona Lisa. He knew the building’s layout, its staffing patterns, and its security gaps. He was also, by Valfierno’s account, susceptible to a particular argument.
Valfierno told him the theft would be an act of patriotism. The Mona Lisa had been created by an Italian, on Italian soil, depicting an Italian subject. France had no rightful claim to her. Peruggia, who appears to have genuinely believed this, accepted the job.
On Monday, August 21, 1911, Peruggia arrived at the Louvre before dawn dressed in a white work smock identical to those worn by museum maintenance staff. Exactly how he entered the building is disputed: police concluded he had hidden inside on the previous Sunday, when the museum was closed for maintenance and security was minimal; Peruggia himself claimed he walked in with other workers on the Monday morning. What followed is not disputed.
He walked to the Salon Carré, lifted the Mona Lisa from its hooks, carried the 77-by-53-centimeter panel to an unmonitored service stairwell, removed it from its frame and glass case, wrapped the painting in his work smock, and walked out of the museum through the same entrance he had used.
The most admired painting in Europe left the Louvre in under ten minutes.
Six Buyers Received Six Fakes
Valfierno moved quickly. With the theft confirmed and the international press in an uproar, he made contact with each of his six clients and delivered a Chaudron copy to each. Every buyer received the same explanation: the painting in his possession was the genuine article, stolen specifically for him. Every buyer had already paid.
None could contact the others None could contact the authorities without confessing to what he had attempted to purchase. None could seek authentication from an expert without explaining how he had come to possess a painting that the entire world was looking for.
The con was structurally sealed.
Valfierno collected from all six and walked away from the Mona Lisa entirely. He had never wanted it. He had only needed it to vanish. It had.Vincenzo Peruggia waited in his Paris apartment with the original painting hidden in a false-bottomed trunk. Weeks passed. Then months. Valfierno never contacted him. Peruggia began to understand that he had been used.
Peruggia Was Caught Selling the Original
In November 1913, after more than two years of silence from Valfierno, Peruggia took the Mona Lisa to Florence. He contacted an art dealer named Alfredo Geri, offering the painting for 500,000 lire and framing the transaction as an act of patriotism: he was returning Italy’s property to Italy.
Geri arranged for Giovanni Poggi, director of the Uffizi Gallery, to examine the work. Poggi authenticated it without hesitation. Geri contacted the police.Peruggia was arrested in his hotel room with the painting in his luggage. He had waited more than two years for a man who had been done with him the day the theft was complete.
At trial, Peruggia offered no information about Valfierno or Chaudron. He maintained, consistently, that he had acted alone out of patriotic conviction, and that he had encountered Valfierno only once, by chance, at the Louvre. Italy greeted his conviction with something approaching admiration. Letters and gifts arrived at his prison cell from strangers who regarded him as a national hero. He was sentenced to one year and 15 days.
He served seven months and nine days. After a brief imprisonment and service in the Italian Army during the First World War, Peruggia returned to France and resumed work as a carpenter. He died on October 8, 1925, his 44th birthday. He never named his accomplices.
Decker Published the Story in 1932
Nearly twenty years after the painting’s recovery, journalist Karl Decker published an account in the Saturday Evening Post claiming he had interviewed Eduardo de Valfierno personally in 1913 and had held the story, by Valfierno’s request, until after the con man’s death. The article described the plan in full: the six buyers, the six Chaudron copies, the deliberate abandonment of Peruggia, and Valfierno’s organizing insight that he never needed the original painting at all. He had only needed it to disappear.
Decker’s article was the sole source for every element of this account. It has never been corroborated.
Decker was known among his contemporaries for taking liberties with his material, and several specific details in the piece, including the dimensions of the Mona Lisa and the type of wood the panel was painted on, were demonstrably incorrect. No trace of Yves Chaudron has been confirmed independently from any other source.None of the six alleged copies has surfaced in more than a century of searching
Peruggia, who died six years before the article appeared, had denied under oath that Valfierno was more than a passing acquaintance.Whether Valfierno existed as Decker described, existed in some reduced form, or was a character assembled by a journalist who understood that a mastermind made better copy than a solitary Italian carpenter, no investigation has ever resolved.
The Six Copies Were Never Found
The Mona Lisa was exhibited across Italy before her return to the Louvre in January 1914. The 28-month absence transformed her from a celebrated painting into a global phenomenon. Art historians have argued, with considerable irony, that the theft accomplished what four centuries of hanging quietly on a museum wall had not: it made the Mona Lisa the most recognizable image in the world. The empty space attracted more visitors than the painting ever had.
Vincenzo Peruggia is buried in his hometown of Dumenza in northern Italy. His grave can be visited. His role in the theft is documented. His sentence is a matter of record.Eduardo de Valfierno has no confirmed grave, no verified photograph, no independently corroborated accomplice, and no forgeries that any museum or private collector has ever located or claimed.
If Chaudron’s six copies exist, they have hung unidentified on private walls for more than a century, their origins unknown even to the families who inherited them.If they were never made, then the most audacious art con in recorded history was invented whole by a journalist with a reputation for invention, and the only man who could have contradicted him had been dead for seven years before the story went to print.
Either way, the money was never recovered.
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