Discover some of the most important works that would be located in an imaginary “Museum of Lost Art.” Learn about The Ghent Altarpiece by Jan van Eyck, one of the most famous pieces of art in Europe when completed in 1432. But in the subsequent 600 years, it has been the victim of 13 different crimes, and, thus, constantly in and out of that imaginary museum.
Annually, in Italy alone, 20,000–30,000 works of art are reported stolen. The US Department of Justice ranks art crime as the third highest-grossing criminal trade. Who steals art, and what do they really want from it? Learn about some of the most famous art heists in history, from Goya’s Portrait of the Duke of Wellington to Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa.
Most art theft involves organized crime at some step along the route—stolen art being much more difficult to trace than bank accounts and electronic transfers. Discover the mob connections to the still unsolved mystery of 1969 of the stolen Nativity by Caravaggio, and the 13 works stolen from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston in 1990.
Learn about the relationship between connoisseurship, provenance, and forensics. Can forensics alone—even using the latest technology—accurately identify authentic paintings from those that are forged by a great student of the master? Or does the answer still come down to opinion, as it did with A City on a Rock by “Goya”?
Explore the long and troubled relationship between war and art destruction—from the 212 BCE Roman army’s defeat and looting of the Greek city of Siracusa to the 2022 Russian destruction of the Kuindzhi Art Museum in Mariupol, Ukraine. Learn about Hitler’s Altaussee art cache and the complicated issue of art repatriation from WWII.
Learn about the difference between iconoclasm and vandalism regarding the destruction of art. Can acts of iconoclasm be justified if the perpetrator doesn’t consider the piece to be “art”? What about modern-day destruction of a statue of a despised dictator? Explore many acts of religious iconoclasm, including the 2001 destruction of the 16th-century Buddha Statues at Bamiyan by the Taliban.
Much of art is fragile and can be destroyed in an instant by various types of accidents—from a museum visitor tripping over his shoelaces at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge in 2006 and falling into a Ming dynasty vase to fires or shipwrecks. Learn about the great fire of 1698 at Whitehall Palace in London that destroyed works by Michelangelo, Holbein, and Bernini.
When Mount Vesuvius erupted in 79 CE, an estimated 1.5 million tons of lava and ash were spewed over the nearby landscape every second. In addition to people and animals, the eruption smothered uncounted paintings, frescoes, and other artworks, lost for 18 centuries—lost and preserved. Learn about art damage from earthquakes, lightning, and floods, and how some art has been salvaged.
Michelangelo destroyed scores of his own in-progress drawings to make sure no one knew how hard he had to work on a piece. Botticelli sacrificed his own works to Savonarola’s Bonfire of the Vanities in a fit of piety. And other artists destroy their own “imperfect” pieces in sheer frustration. Explore this unusual phenomenon that keeps us from enjoying countless numbers of artistic works we otherwise would have had today.
Explore the stories of many lost artworks for which we have no acceptable explanation. And learn about strange “one-off” situations such as The Rescue by American sculptor Horatio Greenough, who said it “depicted the triumph of the whites over the savage tribes.” Previously located at the US Capitol, a joint resolution to the House recommended the statue “be ground into dust and scattered to the four winds.”
What happened to the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, Leonardo’s Medusa Shield, and the Three Sacred Treasures of Japan? Or is it they simply never existed at all? Explore the many theories about these items, as well as the possibly fabled cities of El Dorado and Atlantis, and other items of modern times. Were they purely imaginary or were they partly real? And will we ever know with certainty?
The good news is that lost art does not have to stay lost forever. Art can now be digitally reproduced with no ill effects to the original piece, which now allows us to enjoy detailed replicas of items such as 36,000-year-old paintings. Learn about the amazing, full-sized, precise replica of the French Chauvet Cave painting. Museums worldwide have digitized artwork to make tens of thousands of pieces available to all of us.