The Mona Lisa Vanishes: A Legendary Painter, a Shocking Heist, and the Birth of a Global Celebrity

“Imagine a palazzo—a magnificent Renaissance building.

It’s Florence, 1503. There are a lot of palazzos. Choose a good one.”

The use of the imperative mood in the first sentences of the book sets the tone for the whole. The narrative voice is conversational and humorous. It also invites readers to be active readers of the story, using the observation skills that Leonardo himself was famous for and that provide a foil for the approach of the detectives in 1911.

“This is a story about how a strange, small portrait became the most famous painting in history. It’s about the shocking theft and bizarre recovery. It’s a glimpse of a new age—a future of conspiracy theories and instant celebrity.”

While the first two chapters create vivid scenes, Chapter 1 in Renaissance Florence and Chapter 2 in Paris’s Louvre on the day the Mona Lisa was stolen, Chapter 3 announces the point of telling these stories. This interplay of description and exposition continues across the book. Nicholas Day includes scenes that read like fiction, interspersing them with age-appropriate commentary that guides readers’ interpretation of the events he describes, tying them to contemporary events, as here he references “conspiracy theories” and “instant celebrity.”

“To solve the theft of Leonardo’s painting, the world needed someone like Leonardo da Vinci himself: someone who observes.”

This is an early reference to the book’s theme of The Importance of Wonder and Curiosity. Day presents Leonardo as someone constantly open-minded and curious, which forms an important contrast to the assumption-driven approach of the theft investigators: If they had approached the investigation with open minds, they could have recovered the Mona Lisa within a few days.