10 Daring Museum Heists

Mona Lisa Leaves the Louvre (1911)

On August 21, 1911, an novice painter set up his easel near the spot exactly where Leonardo da Vinci’s “Mona Lisa”—one of the most well known performs of art in the world—hung in the Louvre. To his shock, the mysterious lady with the haunting half-smile had vanished. French detectives searched for the portray for extra than two many years, mistakenly hauling in poet Guillaume Apollinaire and artist Pablo Picasso in hopes of cracking the higher-profile scenario. At a person issue, American tycoon J. P. Morgan was below suspicion for commissioning the theft. Then, in December 1913, an Italian property painter contacted a popular artwork dealer in Florence, saying to be in possession of the celebrated portrait. Police swooped in and arrested Vincenzo Peruggia, a former Louvre staff, and recovered the painting. It turned out that on the day of the heist, the museum was shut Peruggia experienced both concealed in the museum overnight or walked in unnoticed that early morning with other employees, taken off the “Mona Lisa” from its frame and spirited it out below his garments. Hailed as a patriot in his indigenous Italy, the burglar served 6 months in jail for the crime.

Study Far more: The Heist That Produced the ‘Mona Lisa’ Well known

Nazis Plunder European Artwork (1933-1945)

Right before and throughout Environment War II, Nazis looted an approximated 20 percent of Europe’s abundant art heritage, confiscating valuable cultural assets both owned by Jewish households or held in museums inside of occupied cities. Adolf Hitler, himself a failed artist, hoped to amass a big assortment for his unrealized Führermuseum, and, to do so, directed Nazis to plunder storied museums, together with the Louvre in Paris and the Uffizi in Florence, as perfectly as galleries, churches and the houses of personal collectors. Among the a great number of other treasures seized by German soldiers (many of which ended up recovered after the war) ended up the sculptures and other decorations that adorned the Amber Space, a lavish chamber in the Catherine Palace around Saint Petersburg. Its fabled contents by no means resurfaced, and about the years it has been speculated that they have been destroyed by bombing, shed in a sunken submarine, hidden in a bunker or buried in a lagoon.

Ghent Altarpiece, History’s Most Stolen Artwork, Loses a Panel (1934)

Painted by the Flemish artists Hubert and Jan van Eyck, the multi-paneled Ghent Altarpiece was made in the 15th century for the Cathedral of Saint Bavo in Ghent, Belgium. Hailed as 1 of the most significant artworks in heritage, the huge operate (around 14 feet large and 11 feet significant, and weighing far more than two tons) also has the doubtful difference of currently being the most stolen—at least seven times. Amid its most noteworthy misadventures: In the 16th century, iconoclastic Calvinists tried to pillage and burn up it. In 1794, Napoleon’s troops swiped various panels, which ended up in the Louvre. And in the early 19th century, a crooked cleric in cahoots with an art vendor stole the wing panels, which turned up in a Berlin Museum. By the close of Environment War I, all the components returned to their primary home—but the reunion was transient. One night time in 1934, intruders broke into the cathedral and stole the reduce remaining panel, demanding a ransom. The panel never turned up once again. For the duration of Environment War II, the whole artwork endured potentially its largest menace: remaining swiped by the Nazis and hidden in an Austrian salt mine. (Hitler believed it to be a coded map to ancient Christian relics. Hermann Göring, meanwhile, coveted it for his particular collection.) It was ultimately recovered by the Monuments Males at the stop of the war.

Enjoy: ‘Museum Men’ on History Vault

Museum of Purely natural History Heist (1964)

In a crime that would make national headlines, a few surfer dudes turned jewel robbers managed to sneak into a fourth-flooring window of the New York Museum of Natural Background, generating off with priceless gems, which includes the 563-carat Star of India sapphire, the 100-carat DeLong Star Ruby and the 116-carat Midnight Star black sapphire. Jack Murphy (aka Murph the Surf), Allan Kuhn and Roger Clark, properly-dressed surfers from Miami all in their 20s, were remaining at a penthouse hotel suite in Manhattan. On Oct 29, 1964, following months of organizing, Murphy and Kuhn scaled a fence prior to climbing a fireplace escape, hanging a rope, inching along a narrow ledge and swinging into an open window outdoors the museum’s J.P. Morgan Corridor of Gems and Minerals as Clark served as lookout below. Working with a glass cutter and duct tape to crack into exhibit cases—which had a non-doing work alarm system–the burglars executed their prepare devoid of a hitch right up until they had been arrested two times later. Every single served about two many years in jail for the criminal offense and most of the gems had been sooner or later recovered. 

Pretend Cops Loot the Gardner Museum (1990)

Site visitors to the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston now can only see a framed section of cloth wall where by Rembrandt van Rijn’s ‘The Storm on the Sea of Galilee’ used to cling. It was one particular of 13 important paintings stolen in a mysterious heist that stays unsolved.

1 of the most important art heists in record took area on March 18, 1990, when two thieves disguised as law enforcement officers entered Boston’s Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in the center of the evening, telling guards they were being investigating a disturbance. They tied up the guards in the basement and 81 minutes following arriving, built off with 13 performs of artwork, which include paintings by Rembrandt van Rijn, Johannes Vermeer, Edgar Degas and Édouard Manet. With the artwork and burglars however at massive, an FBI investigation remains ongoing, with a $10 million greenback reward presented by the museum for facts primary to the stolen treasures’ safe and sound return. The museum leaves empty frames in its galleries as placeholders.

Read through Much more: History’s Most significant Art Heist

‘The Scream’ Goes AWOL, Twice (1994 and 2004)

It is a great point the Norwegian painter Edvard Munch created quite a few iterations of his most well-known function, “The Scream,” given that two of them have fallen into the fingers of art robbers. To start with, in February 1994, burglars scaled a ladder and broke a window of the Countrywide Museum in Oslo, thieving its version of the iconic portray. They remaining at the rear of a be aware that read through, “Thanks for the very poor security” and afterwards demanded $1 million in ransom. It was recovered 3 months later as a result of a sting operation. Four men ended up convicted, but have been eventually released on legal technicalities. In August 2004, two masked robbers entered Oslo’s Munch Museum, holding vacationers and staff at gunpoint as they tore a different model of “The Scream” as well as Munch’s painting “The Madonna” off the wall. Norwegian police tracked down the canvases, which had both of those sustained minimal tears and h2o problems, and apprehended the burglars in 2006.

Sweden’s Nationwide Museum Loses Two Renoirs and a Rembrandt (2000)

In a December 2000 heist that could have been plotted by a Hollywood writer,  a gang of intruders employed sensational methods to rob the Nationwide Museum of Great Arts in Stockholm. As 1 of the crew threatened security staff members with a equipment gun, two some others filched two paintings by Pierre-Auguste Renoir and just one by Rembrandt. In the meantime, the robbers’ accomplices blew up automobiles in other elements of the town to protect against law enforcement from fully responding to the problem. (The crew had also thrown nails in the highway outside the museum to thwart pursuers.) The burglars then jumped into a getaway speedboat outside the waterfront museum with their spoils. A number of weeks later on, the museum acquired a ransom notice for $3 million, which it declined to fork out. The perpetrators have been arrested not lengthy soon after. By 2005, all 3 of the missing pieces experienced been recovered.

Whitworth Artwork Gallery Treasures Wind Up Powering the Bathroom (2003)

A few paintings by Picasso, Vincent Van Gogh and Paul Gauguin, collectively worth an estimated $1.6 million at the time, put in a rainy night time powering a boarded-up outside public bathroom after vanishing from the nearby Whitworth Art Gallery in Manchester, England on April 26, 2003. Police investigating the theft obtained an anonymous tip one day after the theft, leading them to the missing artwork’s’ unlikely hiding place— later on cheekily dubbed “the Loovre.” The paintings have been discovered stuffed inside of a cardboard tube inscribed with a observe boasting that the robbers had engineered the caper only to emphasize the museum’s very poor protection.

Bogus Holidaymakers Elevate ‘Madonna of the Yarnwinder’ (2003)

In August 2003, two robbers posing as vacationers plucked the “Madonna of the Yarnwinder,” (1501), a Renaissance masterpiece thought to have been painted by Leonardo da Vinci and value tens of tens of millions of pounds, off a wall of Scotland’s Drumlanrig Castle, the ancestral household of the Duke of Buccleuch. After overpowering the room’s guard, the robbers escaped with the painting to a ready car and ditched the painting’s frame just outdoors the castle gates. Four yrs later on, law enforcement retrieved the portray for the duration of a raid of a Glasgow regulation business, and eight males were billed in connection with the theft. Scotland Yard very long surmised that the portray experienced been in the fingers of drug traffickers, who used it as collateral for promotions. The perform is now on show at the Countrywide Gallery of Scotland in Edinburgh.

Cat Burglar Robs the Musée d’Art Moderne (2010)

A masked guy assumed to have acted alone crept into Paris’s Musée d’Art Moderne on May possibly 20, 2010, and slipped out with 5 priceless paintings, which include Pablo Picasso’s “Le Pigeon aux Petits Pois,” Henri Matisse’s “La Pastorale” alongside with is effective by Georges Braque, Fernand Léger and Amedeo Modigliani, collectively truly worth about $70 million at the time. Vjeran Tomic, who arrived to be acknowledged as “Spider-Man” for scaling the sides of properties for entry—and who honed his parkour capabilities as a teenager scaling the gravestones and mausoleums of Paris’s Père Lachaise cemetery—was convicted and sentenced to 8 many years in jail. Two accomplices, an antique dealer who allegedly requested the heist and a watchmaker who stored the is effective, had been also convicted. Investigators are even now looking down the paintings, which professionals have described as unsellable on the open up current market.