This time from History facts online about Pablo and the Mona. I have read at least 2 fiction novels about the Mona Lisa and posted reviews here. Recently Stolen Lady.
Pablo Picasso Was Accused of Stealing the “Mona Lisa”
Picasso is well known for his surrealist artworks, but the legendary Spanish painter also had a real surreal experience of his own in 1911. That year, on August 21, Leonardo da Vinci’s masterpiece the “Mona Lisa” vanished from Paris’ Louvre Museum, and Picasso was deemed a suspect. Though there was no direct evidence linking Picasso to the brazen heist, the accusations stemmed from the artist’s relationship with a known art thief named Honore-Joseph Géry Pieret.
Pieret was the former secretary of Picasso’s Paris housemate, Guillaume Apollinaire. In fact, four years before the “Mona Lisa” was stolen, Pieret nabbed two Iberian sculptures from the Louvre and sold them to Picasso; the artist even used one of the statues as the inspiration for a face in his 1907 painting “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon.” Upon learning that Pieret was a person of interest in the theft of the “Mona Lisa,” Picasso and Apollinaire planned to throw the stolen art that was in their possession into the river Seine, though ultimately they could not bring themselves to do so. Instead, Picasso was brought before a magistrate and lied, claiming he had never met Apollinaire. In the end, the case was thrown out and Picasso and Apollinaire were cleared two years later, when a handyman named Vincenzo Peruggia was caught attempting to sell the “Mona Lisa” to a Florentine art dealer.
