When Leonardo da Vinci’s “Mona Lisa” vanished from the Louvre in August 1911, police cast a wide net in search of suspects. One of the names they included was that of a young Spanish artist: Pablo Picasso.

The trail began with a Belgian adventurer and petty thief named Honoré-Joseph Géry Pieret, who boasted to the Paris-Journal newspaper in a letter after the “Mona Lisa” theft that he had stolen objects from the Louvre on multiple occasions. (At the time, security at the Louvre was notoriously lax.) Among the objects Pieret pocketed were several ancient Iberian stone heads — two of which he sold to Picasso, who kept them in his sock drawer. 

When Pieret’s confession was published in the newspaper, two men began feeling the heat: Picasso and his close friend Guillaume Apollinaire, a poet who had employed Pieret as his secretary and assistant. (Pieret hadn’t mentioned either man by name in his Paris-Journal letter, but it wasn’t hard to connect some dots.) In a panic, the pair reportedly packed the Iberian heads into a suitcase and headed for the Seine with plans to throw the sculptures into the river. At the last moment, however, they changed their minds. Instead, Apollinaire returned the sculptures anonymously to the Paris-Journal office. Yet the attempt at damage control only drew more attention to the pair.

Apollinaire was arrested and jailed, while Picasso was ordered to appear before a magistrate. Frightened that he might be deported from France, Picasso reportedly denied even knowing Apollinaire. Both men were eventually released after investigators determined that neither had anything to do with the theft of the “Mona Lisa.”

The painting’s true thief turned out to be Vincenzo Peruggia, an Italian handyman who had worked at the Louvre. Yet Picasso’s role in the stolen sculpture affair remains a matter of debate. Most historians agree that he knowingly possessed artifacts stolen from the museum. Some scholars have argued that he may have gone even further and helped commission the thefts, since he was a known admirer of the Iberian stone heads. The artist drew inspiration from the sculptures while creating “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon,” the groundbreaking 1907 painting often credited with helping launch modern art. In a sense, then, the stone heads have left the Louvre many times since.