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.