As mentioned in our last blog post, it can sometimes take decades to recover a stolen artwork, or even longer. Such was the case with the 1979 cat burglar-style painting theft in which the thief abseiled thirty metres from one of the highest windows of the Pinacoteca di Palazzo dei Consoli in Gubbio, Italy, using a mountaineering rope. Once inside, the thief made off with a painting, the Madonna del Melograno, which depicts Mary gazing upon a delicately clothed Christ Child, with a youthful Saint John the Baptist to her left. The artwork was initially associated with the school of Filippo Lippi, but was later attributed to his follower, Pier Francesco Fiorentino (1444–1499).

Forty-five years later, the artwork was identified by the Italian Carabinieri when the painting’s current good-faith owner contacted law enforcement, having discovered the artwork in an underground cellar in the city of Imola.

Art theft cases are often more challenging to investigate than traditional thefts due to the unique nature of the stolen items and the specialised knowledge required to trace them.  Unlike mass-produced goods, artworks are typically one-of-a-kind or part of a limited series, making them harder to sell on the traditional art market, provided sufficient records have been kept by the original owners.  It is for this reason, that stolen paintings sometimes take decades to resurface or, as in this instance, are simply abandoned when the thief realises its a lot harder to sell a "hot" painting than he or she imagined, or when said thief does not have access to the kinds of buyers willing to purchase a stolen painting. 

Likewise, artworks can be concealed and transported across borders before being sold in locations where the source country’s theft records are unavailable, where they can sit unnoticed in good-faith buyer collections for decades.  It is usually during black market circulation that a painting’s provenance is fabricated or obscured and you begin to see stolen paintings in circulation on the licit market.  

Additionally, the high value and cultural significance of stolen art attract sophisticated criminals who often exploit gaps in international law enforcement coordination marketing these works to buyers after the statute of limitations for bad faith dealing has long past. Investigators must also contend with the niche expertise needed to authenticate art and must distinguish genuine pieces from forgeries.

As always, the first step in identifying stolen artwork involves dataset comparisons, as in the case of the Madonna del Melograno.  By finding points of commonality between documented archival photographs of the stolen artwork and close inspection of the suspect work, investigators can confirm on object match or determine if the work presented is a copy or forgery. 

On the left, the image of the stolen work provided to the Carabinieri TPC by authorities in Gubbio. On the right, the image of the seized work.

As can be seen by the highlighted areas, the Carabinieri were able to visually confirm that the painting found in the Imola cellar, was in fact the artwork which had been stolen by the cat burglar in Gubbio forty-five years ago. 

On the final day of 2006, a significant piece of Mexico’s cultural and religious heritage was stolen. The polychrome Santa Rosa de Lima statue, a vibrant 3-foot-tall depiction of the beloved saint holding baby Jesus, vanished from a church in the town of Epazoyucan, in the Mexican state of Hidalgo. The statue, depicted the standing saint holding a child, and crowned with roses, represented more than artistic beauty; it symbolised centuries of devotion to the saint, said known for both her life of severe penance and her care of the poverty stricken in the Spanish Empire. 

For nearly a decade, the whereabouts of the statue were unknown. Then, in January 2017, the stolen artefact surfaced in an unexpected location: the Peyton Wright Gallery in Santa Fe, New Mexico. This gallery, known for showcasing valuable Pre-Columbian artefacts, as well as textiles, sculptures, and Spanish Colonial devotional objects, listed the statue for sale on its website, where its photograph caught the attention of Mexican authorities. The discovery in turn prompted an investigation by U.S. Homeland Security Investigations (HSI), with special agent Robert Nelson taking the lead.

Tracing the Statue’s Journey

In March 2017, following discussions with HSI, gallery owner John Schaefer voluntarily turned over the statue to U.S. authorities before a search warrant was issued.  However, the mystery of how the statue crossed the Mexico-U.S. border remained unsolved.

Court filings and statements revealed that the statue had passed through several hands since its theft. Samuel Silverman, a businessman and former storage facility owner in New Mexico, had consigned the statue to the Sante Fe gallery.  According to Silverman, the religious statue had been abandoned by a former renter who left behind unpaid storage fees in 2007. After numerous failed attempts to contact the renter, Silverman sought to recoup his losses by consigning the statue to John Schaefer’s gallery. 

In April 2017, the statue was officially seized by U.S. authorities and placed in a vault at Homeland Security’s El Paso office. This marked a significant step in recovering the stolen object, but its journey back to Mexico would be far from swift.

The Long Road to Repatriation

Despite its identification and seizure in 2017, the Santa Rosa de Lima statue did not return to Mexico until December 2024—more than seven years later. The reasons for this delay remain unclear, as do details about whether legal disputes or bureaucratic hurdles contributed to the extended timeline.

Upon its return, questions arose about the statue’s condition. The figure of baby Jesus, previously depicted with both arms intact, appears to have suffered damage, with the child's right arm now being missing. It is unknown whether the damage occurred during its time in storage, transit, or elsewhere. 

Also of note, this is not the first time a stolen object has been identified at the Peyton Wright Gallery. In 2004, the Albuquerque Journal reported that US Federal agents seized a bas-relief carving from Mexico worth $225,000 from the gallery. That piece, like the Santa Rosa de Lima statue, had also been consigned by a third party, in this case, a Mexican national.

While the gallery cooperated with authorities in both instances, the pattern highlights the complexities of the art market, where stolen cultural heritage pieces can be bought or consigned and put up for sale by good faith purchasers despite having murky histories. 

A Case That Speaks to Broader Issues

The saga of the Santa Rosa de Lima statue underscores several broader issues in art crime identification and restitution, including: 

• the challenges of tracking stolen art and artefacts (in this case it took 11 years for the stolen artwork to surface);
• the slow wheels of international restitution, (from 2017 identification to 2024 restitution);
• and the importance of vigilance within the art market (accepting pieces on consignment that have insufficient provenance).

For the town of Epazoyucan, the return of the statue is bittersweet. While the beloved icon is back, the years of uncertainty and the damage it sustained serve as a reminder of the vulnerability and fragility of the country's religious cultural heritage.

The General Application Period has just opened for ARCA's Postgraduate Programmes in Art Crime and Cultural Property Protection. Write to for an application package or join us live on Friday, December 20th at 20:00 CET to speak with ARCA's CEO about this summer's offerings. 

If diminished funding and smaller budgets aren’t enough to challenge the existence of many museums we were reminded of another glaring vulnerability. Smash-and-grab assaults occurred in two smaller French museums in the last several weeks. At the Cognacq-Jay Museum display cases were demolished by men wielding axes and baseball bats. Seven ornate snuff boxes valued at $1M were removed right in front of visitors. Two days later, in an apparently unconnected event, thieves walked into the Hieron Museum, fired shots and headed right for a display case housing a 10-ft tall figure of Christ encrusted with diamonds and rubies. Using a chain saw they easily dismantled the case and removed the jewels and some figurines worth an estimated $7M. In both cases the thieves left unchallenged.

There are a number of troublesome aspects to both of these thefts. Foremost is their seeming brazenness. How bold are thefts like this, though? Thieves are well aware that even large museums may be defenceless against this type of invasion during visiting hours. Armed guards can be an intimidation factor, but how willing are they to react with force when the public is present? Smaller museums have minimal personnel overseeing collections, to say nothing of an armed guard. The ease with which the thieves took specifically what they wanted in these two instances and escaped without pursuit can leave us breathless and wondering.

In both instances jewels were targeted, the least likely assets to ever be recovered. Once removed from whatever they adorn they can be sold, and precious metals melted down. Tim Carpenter, CEO of the consulting group, Argus Cultural Property Protection, says, “Considering the monetary value of some of the world’s most precious cultural heritage and the ease with which criminals can convert those commodities, it’s shocking at times to see how little effort is actually directed at protecting these irreplaceable works”.  There are no identifiers on jewels, unlike a painting or sculpture, whose images and data can be relayed to a knowledgeable and increasingly communicative art and auction market. The means of tagging gems with block chain identification is in the very nascent stages. Other strategies like using predictive technologies to scan crowds for likely suspects are worthless in the face of a sudden assault.

The hope, if not to prevent, is to slow the event to the point where a response may be timely. In both these instances the assets were soft targets in easily compromised cases. The technology for constructing vitrines has improved to the point where laminated glass for the hoods is not impossible to break, but very difficult. And the entry point to open the vitrine can be made hard to detect. Not to say that repeated hits with a sledge hammer won’t do the job, but if there is a glass break sensor inside it will surely trigger an alarm, as will object-specific sensors on the assets themselves to compound the immediacy of an alert. At that point the museum would be well advised to make it a loud alarm, in addition to an electronic notification to the police.

Reinforced vitrines and sensors can seem like a burden on small budgets, but if a thorough risk assessment and cost benefit analysis shows the value then these measures should be implemented, at the very least. After that the only recourse is investigation and forensics, if not the hope that one of the thieves will slip up and expose himself. Because the fewer cases solved the more encouragement there is for determined attacks, particularly by those criminals who are unafraid to use violence or force.

The museum, designated a national treasure, was created in 1904 by goldsmith-jeweller Joseph Chaumet, who was the who's-who of jewellery makers in Paris at the time.  It is especially noted for its focus on two thousand year's of religious history, reflecting Paray-le-Monial’s longstanding connection to Catholicism.  

This week however, it was that very religious history which drew the attention of thieves, for the second time...for the second time...but really for the third time. 

In the second daylight theft at a French museum in less than one week, yesterday, at approximately 4pm, thieves targeting the Hiéron in a rapid-fire and aggressive theft.  Arriving by motorbike, a group of four accomplices, stuck, their target, the museum's religious centrepiece, in what has been described as a well-coordinated and well-timed art heist.

Upon arrival, one of the culprits stood watch outside while three others dashed in, firing several shots overhead to intimidate the museum's employees and visitors.  They then made their way over to the museum's national treasure sculpture, the "Via Vitæ" ("The Way of Life").  

Purchased by the city for the museum in 2004, the 3 metre by 3 metre majestic artwork is considered to be jeweller Chaumet's masterpiece.  It took the goldsmith ten years of work (between 1894 and 1904), to create this epic piece.  Steeped in Christian faith, as well as alabaster, gold, precious stones, silver, diamonds, and rock crystal, his sculptural and figural work depicts the most poignant episodes recorded in the life of Christ.  

Yesterday, thieves executed a daring daylight robbery at the Musée Cognacq-Jay, a museum located in the Hôtel Donon formerly owned by the eponymous family, and located in the 3rd arrondissement of Paris.                                                                                Around 10:30 a.m., four individuals armed with axes and baseball bats shattered a large glass display case in the museum, while wearing gloves, hoods, and helmets in order to conceal their identities selecting several of the most valuable pieces. The heist unfolded in front of visitors during regular opening hours, and no injuries were reported among staff and exhibition attendees.                                                                                                                                                            

The event showcased perfume bottles, candy boxes, music boxes, snuff boxes, and sewing kits decorated with gold, precious stones, mother-of-pearl or even enamels, highlighting objects from the 18th and early 19th centuries, which are representative of the Age of Enlightenment when precious objects like these were in vogue in France.  The event included objects loaned from the Château de Versailles, the Musée du Louvre, the Musée des Arts Décoratifs, the Palais Galliera, the English Royal Collections and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. 

In total, seven highly valuable objects were taken by the thieves before they made a hasty exit, departing into the Paris traffic on scooters. 

The stolen material taken in the robbery are as follows: 

This gold snuff box dating from the 8th century and encrusted with agate cabochons made by Johann Christian Neuber , known for his gold snuff boxes, which he called Steinkabinettabatiere.  This object was on loan from the Musée du Louvre. 

This snuff box made of agate plates dating from 1760-1770, with hard stone reliefs, joined by a gold cage mount, and a lid encrusted with numerous brilliant-cut diamonds,  made by Daniel Baudesson, also on loan from the Musée du Louvre. 

This chrysoprase snuffbox made in Berlin, Germany, in ca. 1765, associated with Frederick II, the Great, of Prussia (1712-1786), previously on display at the Somerset House as part of the Gilbert Collection ©,  The Rosalinde and Arthur Gilbert Collection on loan to the Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

This 16th century gold and lapis cartouche shaped snuff box with a cameo of the Birth of Venus Cameo from the UK's Royal Trust. 

This c.1780 snuff box made by Johann Christian Neuber, one of the most celebrated goldsmiths in the history of snuffboxes which combined his own technique of Zellenmosaik, or mosaic of hardstones set into gold collets, with the technique of Roman micromosaics only recently developed, part of the Gilbert Collection ©,  The Rosalinde and Arthur Gilbert Collection on loan to the Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

This diamond-encrusted, varicoloured-gold snuffbox, decorated with figures in neo-classical landscapes, gifted to Thomas Dimsdale (1712-1800), by Catherine II during the Russian smallpox epidemic of 1768, , part of the Gilbert Collection ©,  The Rosalinde and Arthur Gilbert Collection on loan to the Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

Prosecutors have indicated that the French police are treating this as an armed robbery by a criminal gang. As motives are explored, it should be remembered that due to their intricate craftsmanship and historical significance, snuffboxes made of gold and other precious materials, have long been prized by organised criminals, in part because they are small enough to easy move.   

Other examples of snuffbox thefts

"The Fulford Thefts" occurred in 1981 when Temple Newsam House in Leeds was burglarised in a nighttime heist, resulting in the loss of 24 exquisite snuffboxes.   In that incident, the culprits, operating under the cover of darkness, targeted these highly valuable items due to their intricate craftsmanship and historical significance. The incident was named after the notorious criminal gang linked to the thefts, and remains one of the most notable art crimes in UK history from a stately home.  The recovery of some pieces from this theft took decades. 

On June 10, 2003, the Johnson gang carried out a high-profile theft at Waddesdon Manor, a historic estate in Buckinghamshire, England. The gang broke into the Rothschild collection housed at the manor and stole over 100 priceless items, including a significant collection of antique gold snuff boxes. The meticulously planned raid lasted only minutes, during which the thieves targeted small but immensely valuable £5 million collection, due to their portability and worth. 

The Cognacq-Jay museum has specified that it is closed while the investigation is underway and that it will reopen on Tuesday, December 10, 2024.  People who have purchased advanced tickets for the “Luxe de Poche” exhibition or for other activities will be automatically refunded.

What happened during WWII at the Musée du Jeu de Paume in Paris

 by Marc Masurovsky

I have to admit that historians are a strange lot, especially in the choices they make on what to research and write about. Whether they are aware of this or not, their choices, once published and commented on, shape our popular understanding of history and their omissions (what they are not interested in) deprive us of a fuller understanding of historical events, large and small. 

Take the Museum of the Jeu de Paume in central Paris. It is a typical example of this. Aside from the work of Emmanuelle Polack, there is not a single book that has been exclusively devoted to the history of the Jeu de Paume during the years of German occupation (1940-1944) of France. But there are at least 12 non-fiction books solely devoted to Rose Valland’s heroism and work as a French spy and a cultural property recovery officer for the French government.

The outside world may have experienced the historical Jeu de Paume Museum in Paris’ Jardin des Tuileries through the eyes of Rose Valland’s hagiographers. If you are a movie buff, you may catch a glimpse of it in “The Train” by John Frankenheimer, a paean to French railroad workers during WWII who tried their utmost to prevent France’s cultural treasures from being removed to Nazi Germany in the closing months of the German occupation of France. 

The rooms of the Jeu de Paume have been a regular feature on the French Ministry of Culture’s website for over a decade, illustrating its many rooms through contemporaneous black and white photographs made interactive so that you can discover the looted objects displayed there for Hermann Goering’s pleasure.

Do you really know what happened at the Jeu de Paume from Fall 1940 when it opened as a depot and processing station for confiscated Jewish cultural property to early August 1944 when it ceased to function as such? Do you know who worked there, what their jobs were, what objects they handled, how decisions were made day-to-day, why they chose certain objects and not others, their likes and dislikes, who hated who, who slept with who, the internal cliques? This is "perpetrator history" and it should not be ignored. Otherwise, you, we, end up knowing little about a fundamental cog in the machinery of cultural plunder devised by a perpetrator in the 20th century. History tends to repeat itself like an old cliché.

The Jeu de Paume was a laboratory of cultural plunder created by the perpetrators—the German occupying power and a Nazi plundering agency, the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg (ERR), its employees, experts and agents. It is therefore logical to dissect its internal mechanisms so that we can understand how looted, confiscated, misappropriated cultural assets are “handled” by those who carry out these crimes.

Alfred Rosenberg, founder of the ERR

To this day, the Jeu de Paume and the four-year long campaign of confiscation, processing, and dispersal of Jewish-owned cultural property reflects the dark side of the museum world and its cultural workers. Your involvement in the arts and cultural activities, whether as a producer or consumer, does not shield you from engaging in heinous acts as a deliberate cog in a machinery of racially-motivated exploitation, grand theft, and persecution. These people are your typical “collaborators”, persons who intentionally cast their lot with the new sheriff in town—in this case, the Nazis and their local Fascist supporters (in this case, partisans of the collaborationist Vichy government).

PS: The only "depot" of cultural objects that has received proper scholarly treatment is the postwar Munich Central Collecting Point (MCCP) which supplanted Hitler's Führerbau as of May 11, 1945, as a central processing station for recovered looted objects. American cultural officials referred to in pop culture as the "Monuments Men and Women” managed the site. Dr. Iris Lauterbach of the Munich-based Zentral Institut für Kunstgeschichte is the author of that study.

The next article will be devoted to inventories, basic didactic instruments that document cultural plunder.

For more on WWII films with some mention of cultural plunder, check out:

https://plundered-art.blogspot.com/2014/01/the-challenges-of-making-historically.html

For more on Rose Valland, see:

https://plundered-art.blogspot.com/2012/01/three-graces-of-art-restitution.html

For more on the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg, see:

https://plundered-art.blogspot.com/2020/01/the-destruction-of-works-of-art-in.html

https://plundered-art.blogspot.com/2020/01/the-destruction-of-works-of-art-in_5.html

According to a story which was first broke via news reporters affiliated with Italy's  TV program Report and news agency Fatto Quotidiano, the Carabinieri TPC have seized two additional suspect works of art, found to be in circulation via Italy's former undersecretary for culture, Vittorio Sgarbi. 

The first is an altarpiece, entitled Compianto sul Cristo Morto, a 17th century work measuring 118 by 86.5 cm.  The painting represents one of several copies completed by the same artist, Giovanni Battista Benvenuti (also known as Ortolano) which feature more or less the same composition, the newly dead Christ, after his crucification, surrounded by mourners, with Golgotha in ancient Jerusalem, in the background.  This version matches most closely to one which was previously housed in the church of Porta di Sotto, known as the "Madonnina", in Ferrara, which is now in the Villa Borghese collection which is pictured here, at left. 

The altarpiece version connected to Sgarbi has been talked up as "an unpublished copy," like so many of Sgarbi's newly discovered, artistic discoveries are.   It had been scheduled to be hung at an ongoing exhibition Il Cinquecento a Ferrara: Mazzolino, Ortolano, Garofalo, Dossa which has been curated by the art critic scheduled to run through 16 February 2025 at the Palazzo dei Diamanti in Ferrara in Italy’s Emilia-Romagna region.

Just over a year ago, ARCA published a post highlighting suspect artefacts which passed through Michael L. Ward's variously named galleries which were worth further exploration.

In that blog post, it was noted that, according to Edoardo Almagià's Italian sentencing document, the convicted Italian dealer sold Michael Ward the following artefacts:

a. A black figure kylix;

b. A marble lion mask;

c. A  marble sculpture depicting a draped woman; 

d. A terracotta mask;

e. A torso of Aphrodite;

f. A romanesque capital;

g. A cameo female bust in marble;

h. A Roman marble urn;

i. A python crater from  Paestum  + 2 bronze vases;

j. A black figure olpe and marble torso;

k. 2 Attic craters, a hydria and abell crater.

Triade Capitolina on display at the Palazzo del Quirinale