The theft of the Mona Lisa
A Louvre handyman took it; Picasso was questioned
On 21 August 1911 former Louvre worker Vincenzo Peruggia, in a staff smock, walked out with the Mona Lisa. The poet Apollinaire and Pablo Picasso were detained, and the painting turned up only in 1913 in Florence. The press frenzy made it the most famous painting in the world.
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Meanwhile around the world (±25 years)
Whole world
- 1914–1918 World War I — 3 years later
- 1918–1920 Spanish flu pandemic — 7 years later
- 1920 League of Nations founded — 9 years later
Eastern Europe & Russia
- 1908 Tunguska event — 3 years earlier
- 1917 October Revolution — 6 years later
- 1917–1922 Russian Civil War — 6 years later
- 1929–1933 Collectivization in the Soviet Union — 18 years later
- 1936–1938 Great Purge — 25 years later
Middle East
- 1908 Oil struck at Masjed Soleyman — 3 years earlier
- 1908 Young Turk Revolution — 3 years earlier
- 1915–1917 Armenian genocide — 4 years later
- 1916 Sykes–Picot Agreement — 5 years later
- 1916–1918 The Arab Revolt — 5 years later
Africa
- 1886 The Witwatersrand Gold Rush — 25 years earlier
- 1897 The British sack Benin City — 14 years earlier
- 1904–1908 The Herero and Nama genocide — 7 years earlier
- 1922 Discovery of Tutankhamun's tomb — 11 years later
- 1935–1937 Italy invades Ethiopia — 24 years later
Asia
- 1894–1895 First Sino-Japanese War — 17 years earlier
- 1894 Yersin identifies the plague bacterium — 17 years earlier
- 1896–1898 Philippine Revolution — 15 years earlier
- 1911–1912 Xinhai Revolution — same year
- 1923 Great Kantō earthquake — 12 years later
Americas
- 1910–1920 Mexican Revolution — 1 year earlier
- 1913 Ford's moving assembly line — 2 years later
- 1914 Opening of the Panama Canal — 3 years later
- 1914 Death of Martha, the last passenger pigeon — 3 years later
- 1929 Wall Street Crash and the Great Depression — 18 years later
Oceania
- 1893 New Zealand women win the vote — 18 years earlier
- 1893 Overthrow of the Hawaiian Kingdom — 18 years earlier
- 1911 Amundsen reaches the South Pole — same year
- 1912 The death of Scott's polar party — 1 year later
- 1936 Death of the last thylacine — 25 years later
Alive at the time
- Thomas Edison (aged 64)
- Nikola Tesla (aged 55)
- Marie Curie (aged 44)
- Mahatma Gandhi (aged 42)
- Vladimir Lenin (aged 41)
- Ernest Rutherford (aged 40)
- Winston Churchill (aged 37)
- Joseph Stalin (aged 33)
- Albert Einstein (aged 32)
- Pablo Picasso (aged 30)