The year of stolen masterpieces. Since the Louvre heist, there has been an endless string of art thefts

On 18 March 1990, shortly after 1 am, two men in police uniform rang the intercom at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, telling the security guard that they were there following a report of a disturbance. In breach of protocol, the guard let them in through the staff entrance. Once inside, the two men were led down to the basement, where they overpowered and handcuffed the security guard and one of his colleagues. Over the next 81 minutes, they cut Jan Vermeer’s "The Concert", Edouard Manet’s "Chez Tortoni", Rembrandt’s "Christ in the Storm on the Sea of Galilee", Govert Flinck’s "Landscape with an Obelisk" and five works by Edgar Degas – one small painting and four sketches – from their frames. They had to make two trips to carry them out. Thirty-six years have passed. At current values, the stolen works are worth over a billion dollars. None of them have ever been recovered. The Boston heist remains, to this day, the most valuable art theft in history.

Ever since the Mona Lisa was stolen in 1911 by the painter Vincenzo Peruggia, spectacular art heists have always taken place. Hollywood has even turned them into a subgenre that is very popular at the box office. From Doctor No in James Bond: Licence to Kill, who, as well as stroking his cat, loved to gaze at Goya’s Portrait of the Duke of Wellington, which was (in real life) stolen by an unknown person in 1961 from the National Gallery in London. To The Thomas Crown Affair, where the protagonist is a bored billionaire who steals paintings by Monet and Pissarro from the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York purely for the thrill of the challenge. As a crime genre, it has never really gone out of fashion. As far back as twenty years ago, Interpol identified art as one of the most lucrative businesses in the international underworld, second only to drugs and human trafficking. Yet nothing has been the same since October 2025, when four thieves dressed as construction workers used a ladder to enter the Louvre through an unguarded window, making off with eight pieces from the French Crown Jewels and the Napoleonic collection, with a total estimated value of 90 million euros. During their escape on a scooter, the thieves lost Empress Eugénie’s tiara, which was later recovered, albeit damaged.

As if a dam had burst, an endless string of art thefts has marked the past year. The list is long. In March this year, a gang of four broke into the Magnani Rocca Foundation in Mamiano di Traversetolo, not far from Parma, stealing three works by Renoir, Cézanne and Matisse, valued collectively at over 9 million euros, and leaving behind a Renoir painting as they fled. In this case, the masterpieces were recovered a few months later by a specialist unit of the Carabinieri. There is, however, no trace of the 27 pieces of jewellery, with an estimated value of 5 million euros, stolen at dawn on Sunday 5 July from the Musée Lalique in Wingen-sur-Moder, in Alsace. There is also no news of the 2,500-year-old solid gold necklace, which belonged to the Princess of Vix and is considered a masterpiece of Celtic art, stolen that same month from the museum in Châtillon-sur-Seine, in Burgundy.

The night of 15 August proved fatal for three of the five panels of Antonello da Messina’s “Polittico di San Gregorio”, which were stolen from the MuMe, the Interdisciplinary Museum of the Strait Metropolis, whilst the people of Messina, as is traditional, were celebrating the exploits of Mata and Grifone, the two giants whom legend holds to be the city’s founders. Later that same month, there were two thefts within 48 hours. On the 26th, at the Villena Archaeological Museum in the Spanish province of Alicante, thieves managed, in less than five minutes, to make off with one of Europe’s most important collections of Bronze Age jewellery: over 10 kilograms of pieces in gold, silver, iron and amber, a priceless treasure discovered in 1963 by the archaeologist José Maria Soler. The following day, in Vienna, two men bought tickets to the Van Cleef & Arpels jewellery exhibition at the MAK, the Museum of Applied Arts. Once inside, they smashed the glass of a display case with a hammer and made off undisturbed with a platinum necklace set with 673 diamonds, crafted by the famous Parisian jewellery house and formerly owned by Queen Nazli of Egypt. In 2016, the 200-carat piece had been sold at auction by Sotheby’s in New York for 4 million euros.

The long, hot summer of art thefts continued into September on the Côte d’Azur. At the start of the month, two thieves broke into the museum dedicated to Pierre-Auguste Renoir in Cagnes-sur-Mer, near Nice, stealing four paintings by the great Impressionist. The police arrived five minutes later but narrowly missed them; in their haste to escape, the criminals were forced to abandon two of the works in the museum’s garden, which is housed in a villa where the master once lived. The Riviera heist has amplified the embarrassment and humiliation of the French cultural establishment, with major newspapers, from Le Monde to Le Figaro, raising the question of whether anything is safe in France’s museums today.

Who is behind these heists? And why has the underworld rediscovered art – stolen goods that, after all, are not that easy to cash in on? ‘Changing tactics, changing targets’ is the title of a recent Interpol report on art theft. If it ever had any basis in reality, the Hollywood image of sophisticated thieves—great connoisseurs of painters and goldsmiths, maverick geniuses capable of ingenious tricks, experts in all manner of technological contraptions—has now faded. Remember Sean Connery in Entrapment?

Gone are the days of subtlety and cunning; today’s criminals rely on violence, speed and heavy equipment for their heists: sledgehammers, crowbars and angle grinders to break down doors, windows and display cases. In the case of the raid on the archaeological treasures at the Drents Museum in Assen, the Netherlands, which took place in January, the thieves even used explosives to blast a hole in the outer wall. As we have seen, speed of execution is an essential element of these new tactics: eight minutes at the Louvre, five in Alicante, three in Messina and Parma. “Unlike the art thieves of the past, who avoided violence,” the report states, “these individuals have experience in other types of crime.” In other words, rather than for their knowledge of the Renaissance or Impressionism, they were hired for their skills as burglars and their willingness to use violence. One of those arrested for the Louvre heist said he thought he had been recruited – with a promised payment of 17,000 euros – to rob a jewellery shop. This does not detract from the fact that behind the foot soldiers lie organised crime networks and powerful bosses, who know exactly what they want to steal and how to make huge profits from it.

“Criminals follow the market, read the newspapers and are aware of the astronomical prices at which Impressionist works are sold at major international auctions, or the price of gold, which has reached 5,000 dollars an ounce. ‘They go where the money is,’ explains Robert King Wittman, a former FBI agent and now a private detective, to the Wall Street Journal; in his twenty-year career, he has recovered stolen art worth over $300 million. Equally important, the investigator adds, is the very choice of artworks and the locations where they are kept: “They favour easy targets, such as museums, because security measures there are more lax.” In small European museums in particular, in fact, the guards inside are unarmed and act more like visitors tasked with enforcing the rules, such as the ban on taking photographs or getting too close to the artworks. “What can they do if someone suddenly pulls out a hammer and smashes a display case?” Furthermore, Europe is a prime target partly because collections and art galleries are often housed in historic buildings, some over a century old, and “it is very difficult, expensive and sometimes impossible to install state-of-the-art digital technology in buildings where the walls are up to a metre thick”.

But how are profits made from this sort of stolen goods? What do you do with a Cézanne or a Renoir that are catalogued and listed, as we shall see, in today’s databases, and are therefore impossible to sell legally, let alone exhibit in public? A classic answer is that there are always mad collectors or underworld plutocrats willing to buy stolen masterpieces to enjoy them in secret, like James Bond’s Doctor No and his Goya, for instance. “But I’ve never seen anything of the sort,” says Wittmann. So why steal the Great Masters? According to Stefan Koldehoff, who has written a seminal book on the subject – Aktenzeichen Kunst (Du Mont, 2004) – “the forbidden passion of some eccentric no longer has anything to do with it, if indeed it ever did, and art is stolen solely for money”. He points to three surprising developments in the objectives pursued by the new art crime syndicate. The first is blackmail, directed at the museum or the insurance company to persuade them to pay a sum in exchange for the return of the artwork. This is known as ‘artnapping’, though it does not always work, as a great many museums – particularly small, private ones – have had to forego the costly luxury of an anti-theft insurance policy for budgetary reasons. This is also because they could never afford to constantly update their alarm systems, as required by the insurance companies. In the United Kingdom, refusing to pay a ransom is even an official policy of every collection. The second variant sounds even more unusual. “Works of art can be used as a direct or indirect means of payment,” says Koldehoff, “in the latter case as a tool for money laundering.” A textbook example is that of an organisation seeking to get involved in a major drugs or arms deal and using a stolen painting to pay for a consignment of cocaine or a supply of rifles. It appears this actually happened a few years ago, involving a work by Gabriel Metsu, a Dutch painter of the Golden Age. In another case, the stolen artwork – an oil painting by Vermeer – was used as collateral to secure a loan to purchase a stake in a shell bank based in Antigua, in the Caribbean, through which to channel dirty money. A third, but by no means the least common, use is as a bargaining chip, which a criminal can bring to bear to improve their position should they be arrested for other offences. Put very simply: I’ll tell you where the Rembrandt is, and you’ll give me a reduced sentence. “A symbolic piece of a nation’s artistic heritage,” explains Vernon Rapley, a consultant who has worked for Scotland Yard, “can be returned to the authorities in exchange for leniency towards gang members in prison for reasons entirely unrelated to the theft in question.”

The possibility of a discreet re-entry onto the market obviously remains, though it is becoming increasingly complicated; this generally does not happen until four or five years after the theft, when the excitement has died down and even the investigators have turned their attention to more recent cases. But the exception proves the rule: In 2006, a painting by Matisse, "The Luxembourg Gardens", stolen a week earlier from a museum in Rio de Janeiro, was auctioned for four hours on the Russian website Mastak (this was still the era when Moscow’s new oligarchs were splashing the cash in the art world) at a starting price of 13 million dollars, before disappearing once more. It has never resurfaced, but Interpol suspects that the work (stolen alongside three paintings by Monet, Picasso and Dalí) is still in the hands of drug traffickers.

However, selling on the open market is an option that has been made increasingly difficult in recent decades by the emergence of organisations such as the Art Loss Register and Swift-Find – databases which, thanks to their detailed catalogues, are able to exercise a certain degree of control over national and international art fairs and auction houses where some of the works might reappear. But all this applies to paintings. Even sadder is the fate of jewellery, which is generally stolen not for its cultural value, but because it can be dismantled, broken up, melted down and resold as precious stones whose origin can no longer be traced, or simply by weight as gold. The 2007 theft from the Bode Museum in Berlin of the ‘Big Maple Leaf’ – a 100-kilo pure gold coin minted by the Royal Canadian Mint, worth 4 million euros at the time, a value that would now be three times that amount – remains a famous case. In 2020, three men from a criminal gang of Arab origin were convicted, but the coin has never been recovered, and investigators are convinced that it was immediately melted down or cut into pieces and sold on the black market.

Will museums be able to stem this wave of crime? Will they have to turn themselves into fortresses, with barriers, bulletproof glass, facial recognition and ‘hostile identification techniques’, with teams of officers ready to stop visitors at random? This would be extremely costly and unfeasible, not least because it would negate the very concept of ‘accessibility’ that has underpinned the philosophy of all European museums – which, incidentally, receive generous public funding. But the problem remains, because as well as the duty to keep them accessible, they also have a duty to protect and preserve those masterpieces for future generations.