From Da Vinci to a golden toilet: a history of museum heists

The theft of eight items from the Louvre, including Napoleonic-era jewellery, has left Paris reeling from one of the “most spectacular” but “brazenly simple” heists of the last century.

It comes at a time when museums and art collections are “increasingly being targeted by criminal gangs”, said the BBC, inspired by some of the most daring, and peculiar, art heists in the modern era.

‘History’s biggest art heist’

The Louvre, the most popular museum in the world in 2024 with nearly 9 million visitors, has a “long history of thefts and attempted robberies”, said The Associated Press.

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One of the most famous incidents involved the theft of the prized “Mona Lisa” in 1911, after a former worker at the museum “walked out with the painting under his coat”. It is thought he wanted to repatriate Da Vinci’s work to Italy, but the painting was recovered in Florence two years later and reinstated in the museum. The mystery and uniqueness of the painting, and the drama of this heist, arguably “helped make Leonardo da Vinci’s portrait the world’s best-known artwork”.

On the other side of the Atlantic, the aggravated robbery of 13 artworks from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston in 1990 shocked the world. To this day, it is “history’s biggest art heist”, with more than “half a billion dollars” of art vanishing into thin air, said CNN.

Two security guards were “bound in duct tape” and subsequent intelligence led police to suspect that the “Corsican mob” was behind the operation. This line of investigation “fell apart” when the art they were trying to sell ended up being from a robbery at a Nice museum instead. Despite the scale and value of the heist, “not a single motion detector was set off”, with rumours since circling of “ghost robbers”, or perhaps more likely “an inside job”. None of the art has since been recovered.

‘The Scream’ and a golden toilet

Perhaps the second most famous artwork in this list, Edvard Munch’s “The Scream” was stolen from the National Museum of Art, Architecture and Design in Oslo just four years later in 1994.

Using a ladder to gain entry in the dead of night, the robbers “made a beeline” for the piece and used wire cutters to access the work in “50 seconds to be precise”, said The Collector. Allegedly, the assailants left the guards a note saying “Thanks for the poor security”, and the whole escapade was caught on camera. Fortunately, within three months the police arrested four men, with the ringleader receiving six years in prison. The painting was safely recovered from a “hotel room in Aasgaarstrand”, 60 miles away.

A painting stolen once is shocking enough, but one taken four times borders on comical. “Jacob de Gheyn III” by Rembrandt, housed at the Dulwich Picture Gallery in south London, was stolen in 1966, 1973, 1981 and 1983, in “one of the more bizarre cases of art theft” ever recorded, said Euronews.

The piece has gained the nickname the “takeaway Rembrandt”, but was recovered “after every theft” and it is still on display today. In 2019, the gallery was closed following the attempted theft of two Rembrandts, which was “thwarted” thanks to the gallery’s “robust” security systems, said The Art Newspaper. It is still unknown which Rembrandts were targeted.

Most recently, the theft of a £4.75 million golden toilet from Blenheim Palace in Oxfordshire captured the imagination of the British public in 2019.

Two men were jailed this year following the “bold and brazen” stunt, said The Guardian. The “18-carat fully functioning lavatory” by Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan weighed “around 98kg” and was taken away by “sledgehammer-wielding thieves”. The gold has never been recovered and was “probably melted down”, said The Telegraph. The artefact had been on display “for just under a week before it was taken”, and the palace has since replaced it with a “replica with which visitors can pay £10 to take a selfie”. The new attraction is designed to be a “fun focal point for visitors to sit down for a selfie with a difference”, Blenheim Palace said.