A TikTok joke about the Mona Lisa being stolen went viral, causing confusion among many viewers who assumed it was true.
The video, which was posted by a user named @narvanator, shows a succession of police cars driving past what appears to be the Arc de Triomphe. “POV: You’re in Paris when the Mona Lisa was stolen,” reads the text overlay at the top.
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Posted four days ago, the TikTok has been viewed more than 9 million times and received 1.9 million “likes” from users.
@narvanator then doubled down on the joke, appearing on a follow-up TikTok explaining that he had visited the Louvre with his friends. “She’s gone,” he said. “The Mona Lisa is gone. We spoke to the staff there and they can’t say anything.”
But the Mona Lisa, in fact, has not gone away: the Leonardo da Vinci remains in the Louvre, where it has been on display for a long time. There have been no reports of the Mona Lisa being stolen.
Of course, there was one time when the Mona Lisa was stolen. That happened in 1911, when Vincenzo Peruggia, an Italian handyman, worked with two others to steal the painting and bring it back to its home country. He had tried and failed to sell it to a Florentine dealer, and then sent him to six months in prison for the theft.
In the intervening years, the Mona Lisa has been attacked multiple times, including last year when a cake was smeared on her.
Taking inspiration from the original TikTok, some users pretended that a Peruggia-like figure had struck, bringing the painting back to Italy. One user posted a video of himself in front of the Trevi Fountain in Rome, pretending to be a collector who gets a call from a dealer about the Mona Lisa.
the story continues
As for @narvanator, she held her ground, posting another follow-up TikTok in which she crosses out “MONA LISA IS STOLEN” from her 2023 bingo card.
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Source: news.google.com