Eighty One Minutes: The Gardner Museum Robbery
On the night after St Patrick's Day 1990 two men in police uniforms removed thirteen works from Boston's Gardner Museum. Mireille walks through the timeline, the empty frames and the decades-long inve…
Monday Closing: The Mona Lisa Leaves the Louvre, 1911
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Show notes
Monday closing
On 21 August 1911 the Louvre was closed to the public, and a former contractor who knew the building let himself out with the most famous painting in the world. Nobody noticed for more than a day.
- Why museum guards in 1911 assumed a missing painting was with the photographers
- Vincenzo Peruggia's two years with the panel in a Paris lodging house
- The letter to a Florence art dealer and the meeting at the Hotel Tripoli
- How the theft made the painting far more famous than it had been
We close with the first real conversation about museum security in Europe.
Transcript
Hello, I am Mireille Thibodeau and this is Empty Frames, a show about the moments when a painting goes missing and what it takes to bring it home. We begin in Paris on a Monday morning in August 1911. The Louvre is closed for cleaning, and a man in a white smock who used to work there as a glazier lifts a small poplar panel off its hooks, removes the frame in a stairwell, and walks out past the porter. The painting is the Mona Lisa. Nobody raises the alarm for over 24 hours. In this episode we follow the painting through two years in a trunk under a bed, a letter to a dealer in Florence, and the arrest that turned a modest portrait into the most visited object on earth. You are listening on Witspeak Podcasts. Let us step into the gallery.
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