Those who stole the painting

On August 21, 1911, the Mona Lisa vanished from the Louvre. Strangely, no one noticed right away. The museum happened to be in the middle of cataloguing its collection, and staff assumed someone had simply moved the painting to photograph it. It was not until the following afternoon that it became clear the painting was truly gone.

The culprit was a petty thief named Vincenzo Peruggia. He took the painting to Italy, believing he was returning Leonardo's work to its homeland. Police even brought in Picasso, who was living in Paris at the time, for questioning, but no meaningful lead emerged.

For over two years, the Mona Lisa vanished from the world. But then something strange happened. People began lining up in front of the Louvre just to see the empty space where the painting had hung. Like gazing at the empty chair of someone who has gone, they stared for a long time at a wall with nothing on it.

It is often said that the Mona Lisa became famous because of the theft. But that is not true. The face of the Florentine woman Lisa Gherardini had already been regarded as a masterpiece long before it was stolen. The smile that Leonardo blurred into mist along its outlines rises up a little differently each time, depending on the angle and gaze of the viewer. The theft merely made an already famous painting a little more so.

This painting, made in 1893, bears a faint pencil inscription in the upper left corner. "Only a madman could have painted this!" It is not certain who wrote it, but it has long been said that Munch himself may have written it.

The figure in the painting is less a face than a single shape. A skull-like face, neither male nor female. Wide-open eyes and nostrils, and a mouth opened into an oval. In a diary entry from January 1892, Munch wrote that while walking along Ekeberg hill at sunset, he saw the sky turn blood red and felt an endless scream pass through nature. The swirling blue landscape and the burning orange sky feel like afterimages of that very moment.

This painting has been stolen twice. In 1994, The Scream, hanging in the National Gallery of Norway, disappeared, only to be recovered within the same year. Ten years later, in 2004, armed and masked robbers tore the painting from the wall of the Munch Museum in broad daylight, in full view of onlookers.

Each time the painting returned, conservators rushed to restore it. But Munch himself likely would not have wanted that. To him, a painting was something alive, something that aged. He would deliberately leave finished works out in the garden to be battered by wind and rain — a practice sometimes called "horse cure" — and through it, the painting slowly aged on its own. The stains and traces of wax still visible on the canvas today are marks of that time. For conservators, The Scream is a difficult painting to handle, something of a nightmare.