On 21st August 1911, people walked into Salon Carré, inside the Louvre museum and spotted this.

A man named Vincenzo Peruggia, is behind what is considered the greatest Art theft in history, and inspired the Dhoom movie series.

(Some parts in this tweet are fake news, you guess which one)

What Vincenzo did can be described as Daylight Robbery..

You have every right to ask why?

Because he walked into the Louvre at 7AM with other employees. He wore a white smock, something most employees wore.

He walked into Salon Carré, saw that it is empty, he lifted the painting off the four iron pegs that secured it to the wall and took it to a nearby service staircase. There, he removed the protective case and frame.

Some people report that he concealed the painting under his smock. But he was a short man and despite the relative small size of the Mona Lisa, it would have been difficult to conceal it that way.

Mona Lisa is the smallest and least impressive painting in that section.

Instead he removed the smock, wrapped it around the painting and walked out the Louvre in the same door that he walked in.

Peruggia hid the painting in his apartment in Paris.

Supposedly, when police arrived to search his apartment and question him, they accepted his alibi that he had been working at a different location on the day of the theft.

Peruggia kept the painting hidden in a trunk in his apartment for two years.

He then returned to Italy with it. He kept it in his apartment in Florence, Italy but grew impatient, and was finally caught when he contacted Alfredo Geri, the owner of an art gallery in Florence.

Geri called in Giovanni Poggi, director of the Uffizi Gallery, who authenticated the painting. Poggi and Geri, after taking the painting for “safekeeping”, informed the police, who arrested Peruggia at his hotel.

This image shows Vincenzo Peruggia’s apartment after police went through it to find the stolen Mona Lisa painting, 1911.

After its recovery, the painting was exhibited all over Italy with banner headlines rejoicing its return to Italy and then returned to the Louvre in 1913.

Here are some images of the painting at the Uffizi gallery in Florence.

While the painting was famous before the theft, the notoriety it received from the newspaper headlines and the large-scale police investigation helped the artwork become one of the best known in the world.

This is the image of the Mona Lisa returning to the Louvre.