But a century ago, you probably did not know the one. She was rarely seen.

During most of her life, from the early sixteenth century up through the early twentieth, “Mona Lisa” was a somewhat popular painting, particularly among artists. But her visage was not widely circulated in public. If you wanted to see her, you had to visit the Louvre.

To become the super-famous painting we know today, “Mona Lisa” needed an epic event — something momentous to transform her into one of the most iconic images in human history.

She needed to disappear.

That’s exactly what happened on August 22, 1911, when the painting was stolen. It is the greatest art heist story ever told, because it was absurdly simple, relatable in one sentence:

After hiding in a broom closet until the museum closed, a former Louvre employee walked out with the painting under his coat.

Mona Lisa” in the Louvre, before and after the heist.

That’s it. For more than two years, “Mona Lisa” was gone, and investigators had no idea where she went. While a copy hung in its place, many suspects were interrogated, including Picasso and Apollinaire. But with no significant leads, most experts predicted she would never be seen again.

Her disappearance ignited a media firestorm.

Suddenly, everyone wanted to talk about “Mona Lisa.” Newspapers and magazines seized upon the fascination, spewing reportage of not only the theft, but the painting’s significance. Experts were contacted; theories, devised. Here is my favorite story, written during Mona’s absence, from the New York Times:

A clipping from page 4A of the New York Times, on August 25, 1911.

This two-grapher has everything: dubious aesthetics, sketchy attribution, casual quackery, and, most of all, underminey snark. A mere three days after the “Mona Lisa” caper began, the paper of record was already throwing shade on the aggregation reporting (“the thousand and one articles”) of other publications, while coughing up a couple of sentences of its own curation and conjecture. The New York Times was trolling blogs before they even existed!

When the “Mona Lisa” was stolen, she transformed from a mere painting into the iconic image we know today — an object to study, debate, share. By disappearing, “Mona Lisa” became…

#monalisa

Unlike “Mona Lisa,” #monalisa was an international sensation, known to everyone. A deep obsession erupted, encasing her in the mysterious qualities still debated today: her smile, eyebrows, eyeballs, hands, teeth, age, gender, gaze, nakedness, background, location, pregnancy, photon reflections, cholesterol, self portraiture, name, golden ratio, facial paralysis, sfumato, encoded data, happiness, geometry, canvas — whatever topic a theory would stick to.

Instantly, art criticism went mainstream.