August 21, 1911. On a Monday morning, a department store employee on a Paris street sees a man hurrying by. He carries a white-wrapped package and, as the employee watches, he throws something small and shiny over his shoulder...it’s a doorknob. Then the man disappears into the streets of Paris. That store employee has just witnessed a small part of what will soon become the world’s most famous crime. In that white-wrapped package was...the Mona Lisa. Why has the Mona Lisa enchanted so many people since the 1500s? And how did a struggling Italian handyman manage to steal it?
Thank you to our guests, Martin Kemp, author of Mona Lisa. The People and the Painting, and Dr. Noah Charney, founder of the Association for Research into Crimes against Art.
This episode originally aired on August 16, 2021.
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