That impenetrable smile. Bemusement? Seduction? Indulgence?

Vincenzo Peruggia was able to gaze leisurely at those fine curving lips, alone, for two years. Just he and La Gioconda — the Mona Lisa to you and me, the Leonardo da Vinci masterpiece Peruggia stole from the Louvre, where he worked, in Paris on Aug. 21, 1911.

• PHOTOS: Stolen Masterpieces

It was the art world’s first blockbuster heist. An act that made international headlines and fuelled global whodunit theories until the portrait was recovered and the thief unmasked. It turned out he had simply tucked it under his smock and walked away.

There was an unexpected by-product of Peruggia’s daring larceny: It was good for the art business.

“When the Louvre reopened eight days after the theft, people flocked to see the empty space on the wall — and the Louvre kept it that way for a very long time,” said writer/director Joe Medeiros, whose documentary film, The Missing Piece: The Truth About the Man who Stole the Mona Lisa was screened in New York and Philadelphia last week.

Before the theft, the Mona Lisa was famous in elite circles but unknown to the masses. The search for da Vinci’s work boosted its appeal and legend.

“People didn’t really know who she was (in 1911). In fact, when she was stolen the French police handed out 6,500 flyers with her picture on it so people would know what it looked like when they saw it,” said Medeiros.

“So it really awakened a lot of interest in art and in the Mona Lisa specifically.”

A painter by trade, Peruggia was tried in Florence. He told the court he was a patriot returning the painting to Italy — even though its rightful owner was French king François I, who’d bought it. Peruggia was convicted, quickly released and fêted as a national hero in Italy.

Yet Peruggia would not live long enough to understand he’d made art-napping an enduring art form.

Over the next century, brazen break-ins, mysterious cat burglars, ransom notes, stumped sleuths, heartbroken curators, and even a movie mention — villainous Dr. No shows off a pinched Goya to Agent 007 — helped romanticize art thefts as victimless capers. From Munch to Matisse, when a museum-quality piece is swiped, it becomes mainstream news — and therefore, a more interesting work of art.

“When the Mona Lisa went missing, it was a huge story which also set a precedent in terms of the way the media, even today, cover art thefts,” said journalist Josh Knelman, author of Hot Art, a book that investigates thefts and their impact on cultures and communities. It will be released in September.

Knelman said the Mona Lisa’s tale also helped launch “the trend of understanding that famous art works are prized by the cultures that guard them.”

Knelman cited The Concert as a more modern example of the Mona Lisa effect. Vermeer’s 17th-century oil on canvas was one of 13 pieces taken in 1990 from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston in what’s considered the richest museum looting in art history..

“I’m sure many more people now know about Vermeer’s The Concert and have seen an image of it since it was stolen from the Gardner museum,” said Knelman. “That particular work has become one of the most famous works of art in the world because it was stolen and because the Gardner hung an empty frame in its place.”

Unlike Hollywood interpretations of museum crimes, the pattern of today’s thefts make Peruggia’s pilfering seem quaint.

Neutralizing million-dollar security systems in violent, armed daylight robberies in which art is ripped off walls and tossed into getaway cars is the new normal. So are Interpol alerts, international art recovery organizations and law enforcement teams that specialize in art and cultural heritage law.

Another reality: Very little work is ever recovered.

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Gardner museum officials are offering a $5 million (U.S.) reward. So far, no takers.

The Gardner group mentions on its website that the ancient works need to be kept in climate-controlled conditions to prevent damage. It’s almost poignant, reaching out to thieves, asking that they respect the irreplaceable goods they’ve snatched.

Canada has been hit, too. The biggest ransacking was in 1972 when armed thieves entered the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts through the skylight and made off with 18 paintings and 37 artifacts. They bound and gagged three guards then fled in an armoured truck when they tripped the alarm. Among the paintings was a rare Rembrandt landscape worth more than $1 million (Canadian). Only one item has been recovered.

Canada is considered a soft target by art thieves, largely because only one police force (Montreal) has a dedicated staff handling such crimes. The proximity to a huge global market, New York, also makes transporting items over the border easy.

“Canada is a great place not only to steal art but to keep stolen art and sell stolen art,” said Knelman.

“You wouldn’t necessarily think Canada would be a great place to say, sell an Iraqi cylinder seal but who (in law enforcement) is looking for it here? (In Toronto), we do have a big market in terms of collectors — look at all those condos being built.”

Bonnie Czegledi, an international art and cultural heritage lawyer based in Toronto, writes about many heists, including the Montreal robbery in her book Crimes Against Art. Czegledi, also a multimedia visual artist, said it’s a myth that stealing from museums doesn’t hurt anyone.

“It’s a crime that’s been glamourized and it’s not a very pretty crime because there are many victims. When a gallery is robbed, the artist is a victim, the gallery, the people owning the gallery (are victims) and society is a victim because the public is deprived of the cultural experience of looking at artwork. A museum’s major job is to educate the public and when they’re robbed, we all lose the ability to understand our past.”

Another myth? There are no Dr. Nos out there, putting out contracts on certain works to hang them in their lairs.

“The romantic ideal that art theft is a beautiful crime where very famous paintings end up on the wall of unscrupulous collectors has not been the evidence I’ve uncovered in my research,”said Knelman, who’s spent months interviewing detectives from the FBI, Scotland Yard, Interpol and experts from private companies for his book.

Peruggia tried to paint himself as Mona Lisa’s saviour, something of a Dr. No collector to save her from the French who had been cruel to him. In the end, though, he tried to sell her for a fortune.

He failed, but the Louvre cashed in.