The Mona Lisa Vanishes

On a hot August day in Paris, just over a century ago, a desperate guard burst into the office of the director of the Louvre and shouted, *La Joconde, c’est partie*! The *Mona Lisa,* she’s gone!
No one knew who was behind the heist. Was it an international gang of thieves? Was it an art-hungry American millionaire? Was it the young Spanish painter Pablo Picasso, who was about to remake the very art of painting?
Travel back to an extraordinary period of revolutionary change: turn-of-the-century Paris. Walk its backstreets. Meet the infamous thieves—and detectives—of the era. And then slip back further in time and follow Leonardo da Vinci, painter of the *Mona Lisa,* through his dazzling, wondrously weird life. Discover the secret at the heart of the *Mona Lisa* —the most famous painting in the world should never have existed at all.