And maybe that’s the uncomfortable truth. Society romanticizes the perfect heist — the charm, the precision, the elegance — until it happens in real life. In 1911, when the Mona Lisa disappeared from this same museum, the thief was celebrated as a folk hero. But Sunday’s robbery, like that one, isn’t an art — it’s a crime.

On this day 114 years ago, a handyman walked into the Louvre Museum in Paris and walked out with the most famous painting in the world. That's right, the Mona Lisa was stolen on Aug. 21, 1911, so inconspicuously its search led to a comedy of errors so ...