When the Mona Lisa was stolen from the Louvre in 1911, they spent four hours before anyone knew it was gone. Then, thousands of people flocked to see the empty space where the painting had hung. Many of them had never seen the painting. In The theft of the Mona Lisa. What prevents us from seeing art, Darian Leader addresses the intriguing story of the theft of the painting and the public reaction to this event as a starting point to explore the psychology of visual art observation. What we expect to see in a painting, and what is hidden from us? Why some artists feel compelled to live more colorful so that their own works? Why the police missed its long investigation into the theft of Leonardo's masterpiece? Is the artwork a sort of screen that covers what is immediately behind: death, emptiness, horror, Lacanian Thing? The psychoanalyst Darian Leader combines with a great sense of narrative, the story of wonderful anecdotes, insightful observation and subtle analysis of examples from the classical and contemporary art to create a surprising and bold theory of what we see and not see in art . How often is essentially absent, that which by definition is beyond representation, and that the work of art points (or plot) to open a positive vacuum.