Eduardo de Valfierno, who posed as a marqués (marquis), was supposedly an Argentine con man who allegedly masterminded the theft of the Mona Lisa in 1911.
[1] In 1932, journalist Karl Decker published a story in the Saturday Evening Post claiming Valfierno paid several men to steal the work of art from the Louvre, including museum employee Vincenzo Peruggia.
Before the heist took place, Valfierno allegedly commissioned French art restorer and forger Yves Chaudron to make six copies of the Mona Lisa.
In the 1985 television series The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes starring Jeremy Brett, "The Final Problem" episode begins with the theft of the Mona Lisa, masterminded by Moriarty to sell prepared fakes to collectors.
One of the plot revelations of the 1978 novel The Perfect Thief by Ronald Bass is that the character Voleur used this con, stealing a Goya painting so he could sell 32 forgeries to various buyers.
The Argentine novelist Martin Caparros published in 2004 the novel Valfierno, in which he reconstructs in fictional form the biography of the con man, as well as those of his accomplices and the historical milieu.