The Horses of St Mark
A bronze set of four Greek horses walking in a line, each
with one hoof raised. They were most probably made by the Greek sculptor
Lysippus, who worked for Alexander the Great.
Some say they started out on the
island of Chios, but they were stolen around AD 330 from ‘somewhere in Greece’
by Emperor Constantine, who put them in pride of place in his new capital,
Constantinople, on the triumphal gate leading into the Hippodrome.
In 1204,
they were stolen for the second time by Doge Enrico Dandolo after the sack of
Constantinople in the fourth crusade. Dandolo put them on the terrace of St
Mark’s Basilica in Venice, where they stayed until 1797. The
conquering allies sent them back to Venice after Napoleon’s fall in 1815.
Current location: St Mark’s Basilica, Venice.
Dove with Green Peas, 1911, by Pablo Picasso
On 20 May 2010, a cat burglar broke into the Musée d’Art
Moderne in Paris and cut five canvases out of their frames – this important
work from Picasso’s cubist period, plus masterpieces by Léger, Braque, Matisse
and Modigliani.
The man who broke in, a Serb called Vrejan T or “Spiderman”,
somehow managed to avoid 30 CCTV cameras. Sleeping guards and a faulty alarm
failed to stop him.
French police later picked up three men believed to have
been involved in the heist. One of the men claimed the paintings were thrown in
a garbage truck and crushed, but the police say the information gleaned from
them was unreliable. Current location: unknown.
Place de la Concorde, 1875, by Edgar Degas
Originally owned by the German industrialist Otto
Gerstenberg (1848–1935), this Degas was sent by his daughter Margarete Scharf
to the National Gallery in Berlin for safekeeping.
From here it was stolen by
the Soviet army, who packed it off to the Soviet Union in October 1945 on the
same train as the Pergamon Altar and Botticelli’s illustrations for the Divine
Comedy.
The Russians vehemently denied having it (along with roughly 3 million
other stolen artworks) until they audaciously put it on show at the Hermitage Museum
in February 1995 in an exhibition called Impressionist and post-Impressionist
masterpieces from German private collections. Current location: Hermitage
Museum, St Petersburg.
The Wedding at Cana, 1563, by Paolo Veronese
This one-and-a-half-ton painting was commissioned by the
monks of San Giorgio Maggiore, and shows Jesus turning water into wine.
The
huge work (measuring 666cm x 990cm) hung in the monastery, on the very wall
Veronese designed it for, until Napoleon turned the monastery into his Venetian
headquarters in 1797.
He transferred it to the refurbished great hall in the
Louvre. When he decided to use that hall for his wedding to Marie-Louise of
Austria in 1810, it interfered with his plans and he ordered it to be
destroyed, saying “Since it cannot be moved – burn it.”
Luckily, the curators
ignored this command. The Congress of Vienna declined to return it to Venice in
1815 on logistical grounds – it was deemed too large. Current location: Louvre,
Paris.
Limestone bust of Queen Nefertiti, c 1345 BC, by the
sculptor Thutmose
While he was digging at Amarna in 1912, the German archaeologist
Ludwig Borchardt discovered this bust and stole it.
Under the established
procedure of “partage”, he was meant to declare all items to an official of the
Antiquities Service in Tell el Amarna, so a fair split could be made. But he
did not declare her, and when she was exhibited in Berlin soon after, it caused
an outrage in Egypt that has continued ever since.
When Egypt offered to
exchange Nefertiti for another ancient sculpture in 1933, museum officials
agreed but were overruled by Hitler, who said she was one of his favourite
statues and belonged in Germany. The Nazis hid her in the Merkers salt mine,
where she was found by the US army in 1945 and returned to Berlin, despite
Egypt’s protests. Current location: Egyptian Museum, Berlin.
The golden death mask of King Kofi Karikari, 1837–1884
The Ashanti death mask was stolen from the royal
mausoleum in Kumasi, Ghana, during the punitive Ashanti campaign of 1873. Field
Marshal Viscount Wolseley had all the Ashanti gold from the entire city
removed, including masks, swords, headdresses and jewellery.
The current
Ghanaian government has claimed these items, which are mostly housed in the
British Museum today. The mask was bought by Richard Wallace, who bequeathed it
to the British nation. Current location: Wallace Collection, London.
The Art of Painting, 1665, by Johannes Vermeer
Count Rudolf Czernin of Vienna owned this Vermeer before
the second world war. The count declined an offer of US $6m before the war, but
in 1940 accepted RM (Reichmarks) 1.7m from Hitler – the highest price ever paid
by the Führer for a painting, but a fraction of the offers Czernin had
previously rejected.
The Czernin family later claimed that he sold it under
duress (his wife had a Jewish grandparent) and tried to claim it back after the
war. The US army found it in 1945 hidden in the Altaussee salt mine in Austria,
where it narrowly escaped being dynamited by the retreating German army.
In the
mine, spread out over 67km of tunnels on 18 levels, the US army found more than
6,500 artworks that had all been destined for Hitler’s planned super-museum in
Linz. Czernin’s heirs have tried to recover the painting ever since, but their
efforts have been repeatedly thrown out by the Austrian government, most
recently in May 2011. Current location: Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna.
The Nativity with St Francis and St Lawrence, 1609, by
Caravaggio
Nativity with St. Francis and St. Lawrence (also known as
The Adoration)
Also known as the Adoration, this large multi-figure
composition hung in the Oratory of San Lorenzo in Palermo, Sicily, until it was
stolen on 18 October 1969.
Most people believe the thieves were the Sicilian
mafia, and although various mafia informers over the years, including Francesco
Marino Mannoia in 1996 and Gaspare Spatuzza in 2009, have claimed knowledge of
the painting’s whereabouts, it has never been found. Spatuzza claimed it was
stolen for a private collector, but was eaten by rats and pigs while being
stored at a farm. Current location: unknown.
Portrait of a Young Man, 1513, by Raphael
In 1798, Prince Adam Jerzy Czartoryski imported this
self-portrait from Italy into Poland and put it in his family museum in Kraków,
where it remained until it was hidden from the Nazis (along with Leonardo’s
Lady with an Ermine) in Sieniawa.
With the help of the Gestapo, it was
discovered by the Nazi governor of Poland, Hans Frank, and was last seen at
Frank’s apartment in Kraków.
When the Germans fled Kraków before the advancing
Soviet offensive, Frank sent his paintings first to Silesia and then his villa
at Neuhaus.
When the Americans arrested Frank on 3 May 1945 for war crimes,
they recovered many of the stolen artworks, including the Leonardo, but the
Raphael was never seen again. Current location: unknown.
Reclining Nude, 1969, by Henry Moore
This two-tonne bronze was stolen in December 2005 from
the grounds of the Henry Moore Foundation in Much Hadham, Hertfordshire.
CCTV
cameras recorded a gang using a small crane to lift the sculpture on to the
back of a truck. An hour later, the truck, which had been stolen in Roydon,
Essex, was spotted carrying the sculpture through Harlow.
According to British
police, it was then cut up and sent to China, via Rotterdam, where it was
melted down and used for electrical components. The Henry Moore Foundation
offered a reward of £100,000 for the £3m sculpture, but it is believed the
scrap bronze was sold for less than £1,500. Charles Hill, the former head of
Scotland Yard’s art and antiques squad, said he was tipped off by notorious art
thief Jimmy Johnson that a group of travellers was responsible for the theft.
Current location: unknown, probably destroyed.
From TheGuardian:
