The wrong suspects

On 7 September 1911, police arrested the poet Guillaume Apollinaire. The Mona Lisa had been missing since August, and another theft from the Louvre pulled his name into the investigation. Statuettes had been taken from the Louvre by a former secretary of his, Géry Pieret, some of them years earlier. The missing painting and the missing statuettes came from the same museum, but that did not make them the same crime. Pieret had stolen statuettes in 1907. The connection led police to people who knew him. Apollinaire named his friend Pablo Picasso, who had bought stolen statuettes from Pieret. Picasso was questioned about the Mona Lisa too. An old purchase could explain why officers wanted to ask questions. It could not, by itself, show who had lifted Leonardo's painting from the wall in August. Apollinaire was released within a week of his arrest. Both he and Picasso were cleared of involvement in the painting's disappearance. A story that stopped at the arrest would leave the wrong ending. A story that called Picasso the thief because he knew Apollinaire would make a different mistake: it would turn a connection between people into proof of an act. There was a genuine earlier theft here, so this was not a case of every suspicion coming from nowhere. The difficult part was deciding what that theft could explain. Buying a statuette, knowing its seller and stealing a painting are different actions. Evidence about one action must not quietly become evidence about all the others. The dates help keep those actions apart: statuettes in 1907, the painting in August 1911, Apollinaire's arrest in September. The statuettes are usually described as ancient Iberian stone heads, though one reference summary calls them Egyptian. That label does not change the outcome for the Mona Lisa suspects. The painting was still missing when Apollinaire left custody. Neither a well-known name nor an arrest had solved the crime. The story now has to return to the person who had worked around the painting itself: Vincenzo Peruggia.