For as long as art collection has existed, so too has the impulse to steal it. The earliest well-documented case dates back to 70 BC, when Cicero prosecuted the Roman governor Gaius Verres for looting statues and treasures from Sicily. At times, the underlying motive has been money; at others, it has been conquest or simple opportunism.
Art theft has altered reputations and forced governments to confront uncomfortable questions about ownership and cultural identity. Indeed, a stolen painting can become more famous than it ever was on the wall of a gallery. The history of art is full of moments when a theft grew into something more monumental than a crime.
Here are four art thefts that left an imprint on history.
1. The Mona Lisa became the world’s most famous painting by disappearing
In August 1911, Mona Lisa vanished from the Louvre. Da Vinci’s portrait, which was admired greatly by artists and scholars alike, had not quite become the global icon we recognise today. Nonetheless, news of its disappearance spread across global newspapers, and crowds began visiting the museum to simply look at the empty space where it had once hung. Rumours multiplied at lightning speed, and even Pablo Picasso was questioned during the investigation.
The painting returned two years later after the thief, former Louvre employee Vincenzo Peruggia, attempted to sell it in Florence. By then, the theft had transformed its reputation. Reproductions circulated widely, journalists kept the story alive and the painting acquired an aura that no amount of critical acclaim could have created.
Leonardo da Vinci – Musée du Louvre, Paris
Photo source: Wikimedia Commons
2. The Ghent Altarpiece became Europe’s most contested masterpiece
Few works of art have been pursued with the persistence of Jan van Eyck’s Ghent Altarpiece. Ever since the fifteenth century, specific panels have been sold, stolen, hidden and seized during war and carried across borders by occupying armies. Napoleon’s troops seized central panels to take them to the Louvre. During World War I, German forces tried to seize the side panels during the invasion of Belgium. After the Second World War, the altarpiece was recovered from the Altaussee salt mines in Austria, where thousands of artworks looted by the Nazi regime had been concealed as Allied forces advanced.
The altarpiece’s turbulent history mirrors that of Europe. Every theft reflected a struggle over power and cultural prestige. Possessing the work became a statement of political authority, and even today, one panel (The Just Judges) remains missing after its theft in 1934. Countless theories have emerged over the decades, though none has resolved one of the art world’s longest-running mysteries.
3. The Gardner Museum theft changed how museums approach security
In the early hours of 18 March 1990, two men dressed as police officers arrived at Boston’s Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum and convinced security guards to let them inside. By sunrise, thirteen works had disappeared, including paintings by Rembrandt, Vermeer and Degas, altogether worth up to $500 million. More than three decades later, this theft remains the largest unsolved art heist in history.
The crime exposed a contradiction: galleries exist to make extraordinary objects accessible, yet this accessibility leaves them extremely vulnerable. The Gardner robbery prompted institutions around the world to reassess security, implementing upgraded motion detectors and stricter employee screening. Its influence extended beyond museum walls, too, shaping cooperation between law enforcement, insurers and international agencies that investigate cultural property crime. Fascinatingly, with the museum’s founder having dictated that the galleries’ arrangement should never be changed, the museum has kept the slashed frames of the stolen artworks hanging on the walls as symbols of hope.
4. The Green Vault theft demonstrated no era is theft-proof
By 2019, many assumed that museum security had reached a point where spectacular art theft belonged to another era. The burglary at Dresden’s Green Vault, however, challenged that confidence. In the early hours of 25 November, thieves set fire to a switch box to cut the streetlights outside the museum, eventually slipping through a window whose bars had been cut and glued back into place days earlier to avoid suspicion. Inside, they smashed display cases with an axe and escaped within minutes, taking with them 21 pieces of eighteenth-century jewellery commissioned by Augustus the Strong, with more than 4,300 diamonds in total.
The Green Vault theft raised questions about how historic collections should be protected in an age of increasingly sophisticated organised crime, especially once investigators traced the raid to a Berlin crime family linked to a separate museum heist. Eventually, five men were convicted, and dozens of items were recovered through a plea deal in 2022. Nonetheless, several pieces, including one of the collection’s most celebrated diamonds, still remain missing.
