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.