Bernini is renowned as a master of Baroque architecture, and the disappearance of the 18-page manuscript spurred an elaborate sting operation. The suspect allegedly met with Mauro Gambetti, head of administration at St. Peter’s Basilica, on May 27 under the belief that Gambetti was interested in buying the gilded document, which contains details of ornate features Bernini created to decorate the famous canopy rising above the basilica.

Gambetti, however, had secretly partnered with Vatican investigators to ensnare the suspect, who was reportedly accompanied by an unidentified accomplice. After handing the seller a €120,000 ($129,000) check in exchange for the manuscript, Vatican gendarmes arrived and arrested him.

The seller has been identified in Italian media reports as the art historian Alfio Maria Daniele Pergolizzi, who is believed to have stolen the manuscript from the archives of the Fabric of St. Peter’s, an institution established in the 16th century to manage the construction of the basilica and that now oversees restoration of the structure. Pergolizzi served as head of the communications department between 1995 and 2011. Per Reuters, he is being detained in a Vatican prison on charges of attempted extortion. 

Vatican News, the state’s official media channel, reported that Alessandro Diddi, promoter of justice for the Church, will decide this week whether to indict Pergolizzi.

“Looters document their crimes with their own hands, and this allows us to determine the whereabouts of at least some of the stolen art,” the museum wrote on social media. According to a Facebook post by the Kherson Art Museum, the video was recorded in Crimea’s Central Museum of Tavrida and aired on Russian television in last September.

99 of the 100 identified works are believed by the museum to be in Crimea, a Black Sea peninsula that was illegally annexed from Ukraine by Russia in 2014. Ukraine and its allies do not recognize Russian sovereignty over Crimea, a critical entryway into the Eastern Mediterranean, and have campaigned for its recovery since its occupation began.

Among the works identified is Fishermen On The Seashore (1932) by Ivan Shulha, who was a renowned graphic designer, educator, and painter in the Soviet Socialist Realism tradition. Also sighted was Daughter of Guzel (1967) by watercolorist Venera Takaieva, and a 1967 oil painting by Yefrem Zverkov, a prominent landscape painter and founder of the “strict style” genre of Socialist Realism.

The Kherson Art Museum said that three additional oil paintings by Ksenia Stetsenko, Anatolii Platonov, and Antonin Fomintsev, previously included among the thousands of artworks removed by Russian military from Ukrainian museums “under the guise of the so-called ‘evacuation’”, were also spotted in the video.

The museum estimated that the 100 works of art comprise “less than 1 percent” of what has been recorded as looted from Ukrainian cultural institutions.

“Every painting, every graphic work, every piece of artwork, everything we identify, is indisputable proof that the stolen works (at least these) are in the hands of Russian art looters,” the Kherson Art Museum wrote on Facebook. “And to prevent the criminals from saying that ‘they weren’t there,’ as is their habit, we are recording everything we see in the photos and videos from Crimea and Henichesk.”

The systematic plunder of Ukrainian museums by Russian forces, as well as the destruction of Ukrainian cultural heritage, has been documented by Ukrainian media outlets since the beginning of the invasion in February 2022. Prior to the Russian military’s retreat from Kherson, local cultural workers said that nearly the entire collection of the Kherson Regional Art Museum had been cleaned out, while valuable artifacts from the Shovkunenko Regional Art Museum, which specializes in fine and decorative arts from Ukraine and Russia, were also pilfered. 

In Mariupol, one of the first cities occupied in the invasion, a trove of prized Scythian gold dating back to the fourth century BCE was stolen. 

Ukrainian politicians have decried these incidents as an attack on their national identity. Russia has also been accused of violating the 1954 Hague Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict, which was established after World War II and prohibits signatories from “any form of theft” of cultural property. Russia and Ukraine both signed the treaty.

As first reported by the Art Newspaper, the international law firm Dentons in Frankfurt claims that the works belong to its client, Uthman Khatib, a businessman and investor of Palestinian origin living in Israel. The collection is estimated to be worth more than €100 million ($1.08 million), and includes paintings attributed to Wassily Kandinsky, Kazimir Malevich, and Natalia Goncharova. The collector claims the paintings were stolen from a storage facility he rented in Wiesbaden, Germany, in December 2019.

Last year, bailiffs seized a collection of works from a Frankfurt storage facility that Khatib also said was his. Khatib’s lawyer did not give an exact number to the works recovered, saying in a statement to the Art Newspaper that they counted “several hundred.”

Khatib’s son, Castro Ben Leon Lawrence Jayyusi, heads the campaign to regain roughly 900 total works of art lost worldwide. Some of the works from the family collection, Jayyusi claims, were sold within the last year at auctions in Israel, France, and Monaco. His efforts are funded by the Prague-based litigation financier, LitFin Capital.

Khatib purchased 871 works from a collection of paintings numbering 1,800 in 2015, from Itzhak Zarug, an Israeli art dealer who operated a gallery in Wiesbaden. Suspected to be forgeries, the Wiesbaden public prosecutor’s office seized the works upon their acquisition.

Though Zarug was in prison on suspicion of leading a forgery ring, a Wiesbaden court dropped the forgery and criminal conspiracy charges against him in 2018. Zarug and a colleague, however, were convicted of lesser charges for falsifying provenance and selling a forged work.

In 2019 authorities returned the collection to Zarug, which also included the portion owned by Khatib. The art was subsequently taken from Khatib’s storage facility in Wiesbaden, according to court documents.

Jayyusi claims to know the thief and had attempted to negotiate the collection’s return; his appeals unheeded, he took legal action. By 2022, none of the works had been recovered and they reportedly began circulating at auction.

In 2023 the Frankfurt higher regional court ruled that bailiffs could remove Khatib’s works from a storage facility. The Khatib family’s legal team has already contacted two auction houses in France and Israel, respectively, which are believed to have possessed pieces from the lost collection.

“We will follow the perpetrators around the world,” Jayyusi told the AN. “We will continue to recover our property and encourage anyone who is considering buying Russian avant-garde work to diligently check its provenance and make sure it is not a stolen piece belonging to our family.”

According to written testimony, archaeologist and art historian Jean Lafond (who died in 1975) had inventoried a series of stain glass windows at the Rouen Cathedral in 1911 that, it was later discovered in 1931, were no longer there. Five of these six windows were allegedly sold on the Parisian art market before anyone learned of their disappearance.

The window panels would have depicted the “Seven Sleepers of Ephesus”, a famous legend in which Christian soldiers fell asleep in a cave near Ephesus and wake up nearly 200 years later, with the sixth window coming from one of the chapels in the nave.

The pieces were reportedly purchased by American collectors before they landed in the institutional collections of the Glencairn Museum in Bryn Athyn, Pennsylvania, the Worcester Museum in Massachusetts, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

The president of the association Philippe Machicote is fighting to have these artworks returned to the state. In September 2023, Machicote tried to hold Sotheby’s accountable for having supposedly sold two of stain glass windows from Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris in 1862, but the Paris prosecutor’s office did not recognize the appeal.

The prosecutor’s office in Rouen has two months remaining to make a decision on the Rouen Cathedral’s stain glass windows.

Many in England have been paying attention to missing items such as this since last summer, when 2,000 artifacts in the British Museum’s collection were announced as having been stolen, missing, or damaged. The museum’s chair person George Osborne suggested this was due to incomplete cataloguing.

Per the new Guardian report, London’s National Portrait Gallery is reportedly without 45 “not located” items. But the institution maintains that these objects were not missing or stolen. Among those items lost between 2007 and 2022 are a 1869 drawing of Queen Victoria, a mid-19th century engraving of King John granting Magna Carta, a bronze sculpture of painter Thomas Stothard, and a 1947 negative from the wedding of Queen Elizabeth II to Prince Philip.

Following a three-year refurbishment, the gallery said it needs to search for items recorded as unlocated. This loss represents .02 percent of the gallery’s collection.

Among the 180 missing objects from London’s Victoria and Albert Museum were oil and watercolor paintings, a shadow puppet, fake mustaches, drawings, undergarments, and a mousetrap. It is unclear, according to the museum, whether these objects have been lost or stolen.

The Tate art museums and galleries, as well as the National Gallery, have reported no missing items from their respective collections.

The Royal Museums Greenwich could not locate 245 artifacts across its southeast London locations. Such items included a navigational aircraft computer, a gun-sighting telescope, a cannonball, charts, liquid compasses, an act of parliament, an Altazimuth circle, and hat ribbons and bands.

The museum, which has rediscovered 560 objects since 2008 via auditing, has cited incorrect data transfer from earlier databases, incorrect documentation, and human error.

The Natural History Museum recorded the loss of a jaw fragment belonging to a late Triassic Diphydontosaurus during a 2019 loan, more than 180 fish in 2020, and a crocodile tooth.

The Science Museum Group, which has started placing barcodes on artifacts, reported the disappearance of two model steam trains, a King George V and a British Railways Standard 4MT class, to the police in 2014, as well as a 1960s deep-sea observation chamber model, a diver’s torch, a resuscitating apparatus, and a 19th-century portrait of Joseph Marie Jacquard.

Seven objects from London’s Horniman Museum and Gardens were reported missing.

A few missing items were also noted from the Wallace Collection, Museum of the Home, Sir John Soane’s Museum, and National Museums Liverpool.

Ship camouflage drawings, a British army officer’s private papers, a calendar with a photograph of former Iraq leader Saddam Hussein, and currency notes were among the more than 550 missing artifacts from the Imperial War Museum.

After receiving a call from Dombek on Monday saying that he would like to turn himself in, his lawyer Ernie Preate escorted him to the Lackawanna County Prison, where is still in custody, reported the local news station WNEP.

Dombek was denied bail by a federal judge following a court appearance on Tuesday morning.

Dombek is one of nine people accused by federal authorities of involvement in a multi-state theft ring that stole sports memorabilia, art, and other valuables from 20 museums and stores across the East Coast and parts of the Midwest over the course of two decades. Three suspects already plead guilty for stealing Andy Warhol and Jackson Pollock works last year. An additional fourth suspect also pleaded guilty shortly thereafter.

The stolen artworks include Warhol’s 1984 screenprint Le Grande Passion and Pollock’s vibrant blue 1949 painting Springs Winter, taken from the Everhart Museum in 2005; and the painting Upper Hudson by Jasper Cropsey, taken from the Ringwood Manor in Ringwood, New Jersey in 2011. The suspects are also accused of stealing more than $1 million in memorabilia from the Yogi Berra Museum, including nine World Series rings; six championship belts from the International Boxing Hall of Fame; more than 30 golf and horse racing trophies; a Tiffany lamp; $400,000 in gold nuggets; and four firearms worth a combined $1 million.

Until now, Dombek was the last remaining suspect to turn himself in.

According to Dutch media reports, Arthur Brand, known for his help in recovering a Van Gogh painting last month as well as a Picasso painting, was watching TV at home on Friday night when the doorbell rang with a delivery. The delivery man—who was reportedly uninvolved with the heist—unloaded a package that contained six historical paintings believed to be worth upward of €100,000 (about $106,000). After examining the incredible trove, Brand called the police. 

“I think this was a direct result of the recovery of the Van Gogh [The Parsonage Garden at Nuenen in Spring] last month,” Brand told the Art Newspaper. “That made headlines all over the world and one of the reasons the Van Gogh was returned was that they couldn’t do anything with it—sell it or get a lesser sentence.”

He added: “Most likely [the Medemblik thieves] got scared and maybe there was a possibility the police was on their tracks already. You either burn it, which is a bad idea because when you are caught later you get extra prison time, or they thought they would dump it at my doorstep.”

The recovered paintings include an especially prized portrait of the early medieval King Radboud, ruler of Frisia (the present-day swath of Northwestern Europe that includes the Netherlands), as well as likenesses of Dutch royals Prince William of Orange, Maurits of Orange, Count Jan van Nassau, and Queen Wilhelmina. Also recovered was a biblical scene. 

Jeroen Broeders, deputy mayor of Medemblik, said in a press release that “sometimes you only know how much something is worth to you when it isn’t there anymore and that is certainly the case with these paintings.”

In June 2019, the group stole a Chinese Ming dynasty vase, along with two other artifacts, with plans to sell it. Undercover police, however, posed as buyers and tricked them into handing the artifact over in October 2021.

On Friday, Mbaki Nkhwa and Kaine Wright were found guilty of one count of conspiracy to convert criminal property. David Lamming plead guilty to the same offense an an earlier hearing in March.

It took the Metropolitan police’s special crime unit four years of work with Swiss authorities to bring the criminals to justice.

“The white porcelain ‘vase’, which is actually a bottle of the Yongle period of the Ming dynasty, has an interesting tale over its hundreds of years and this is another chapter. I’m glad we were able to return it to its rightful owners,” Detective chief inspector Matt Webb told the Guardian.

The trio had emailed an auction house for a valuation. In July 2020, the auction house tipped off the police, who traced the IP address to Lamming.

Police then posed as buyers when the vase came up for sale at £450,000 ($572,828). At a meeting in a central London hotel, Nkhwa gave police the vase and was subsequently arrested. He and Lamming had been in regular contact with Wright, who drove them to the hotel, according to telephone data.

The Ming-dynasty era items have an estimated value of £3.5 million ($4.5 million); only one of the three items remains missing. A stolen bowl worth £80,000 ($101,836) was sold at a Hong Kong auction house in 2019 and subsequently returned.

A reward of up to £10,000 ($12,730) is being offered for information on the missing “doucai style” wine cup with a decorative chicken.

The book’s protagonist, Stéphane Breitwieser, was hooked on visiting regional museums in his native France and in Switzerland. His souvenirs weren’t trinkets from the gift shop but artworks themselves, plucked from Plexiglas cases, walls, and curated displays. His loot ranged from a centuries-old tapestry to a Jan Brueghel the Elder painting; he stole most of it in plain sight.

One of his many heists took place in 1996, when, with his girlfriend Anne-Catherine Kleinklaus, he visited the Alexis Forel Museum in Morges, Switzerland, where he stole a 300-year-old platter by Charles-François Hannong. Breitwieser was deft at undoing the gadgetry of display cases. Using a Swiss Army Knife, he reached what Finkel calls his “screw apotheosis,” undoing 30 of them.

Finkel describes this theft and countless others in present tense. You are there, experiencing the thrill of the chase alongside Breitwieser. “Twenty-six, twenty-seven, twenty-eight, twenty-nine. And, mercy, thirty,” Finkel writes of the screws. One can almost hear the case popping open, so vivid is the description. Much of The Art Thief unfolds in this way.

Not many pages later, again with Anne-Catherine, Breitwieser is described visiting the Museum of Fine Arts in Angers the year after. He came across the copper painting attributed to Brueghel, Allegory of Autumn, in which a muscular man plucks fruit from a tree while buxom women and a child surround him, and decided he had to have it.

“Anne-Catherine positions herself at the stairwell,” Finkel writes, adhering to Breitwieser’s preferred “blend of one last name and one first” for himself and Kleinklauss. “She’ll cough if the guard takes his eyes off the cashier. Breitwieser climbs a chair, gloves on, and retrieves the work. He slides the frame under a display, and Anne-Catherine returns to wipe down the chair with her handkerchief, eliminating shoe prints too.” As they left, they bid goodbye to guard and a cashier sharing a kiss.

Spoiler alert: Breitwieser did eventually get caught for theft of these and 200-plus other art objects, and then he got caught again and again for other thefts afterward.

After serving two prison sentences (one for the thefts of the ’90s, the other for ones committed in the mid-2000s following his initial discharge), Breitwieser returned to his passion upon his second release. Between 2015 and 2016, he stole Roman coins from an archaeological museum in Strasbourg and paperweights from another nearby institution, and then traveled to Germany, where the plundering continued. “None of these,” Finkel reports, “are pieces he loves.” He was arrested once more in 2019.

How do we get from clandestine thief to sad-sack stealer? The Art Thief charts Breitwieser’s rise and fall in an attempt to account for his obsession. It’s mostly rise, very little fall, which is probably by design, since Finkel seems enamored of Breitwieser.

“I never found any art thieves who really compare to Breitwieser and Anne-Catherine,” Finkel writes of his research in the afterword, the only section penned in the past tense. “Nearly everybody else did it for money, or stole a single work of art. The couple is an anomaly among art stealers, but there does exist a group of criminals for whom long-term looting in service of aesthetic desire is common.”

Finkel locates the source of Breitwieser’s aesthetic desire in a childhood trip to the very Strasbourg museum from which he pilfered the Roman coins. “His finger snagged on a loose bit of metal attached to a Roman coffin,” Finkel says. “A coin-sized piece of lead broke off in his palm. He stuffed it reflexively into his pocket.”

This sounds like an awful tidy bit of myth-making, especially since it’s not easily verified, but Finkel presents it as truth. Even if it is apocryphal, that the narrative was put forward at all by Breitwieser is telling.

Breitwieser’s magnetism lay in his ability to make people believe he was a normal person doing sensible things—that he was just an average unemployed joe with a fondness for museums. This was a ruse. He reportedly even corrected a curator on the date of a 17th-century sword that he stole during one of his trials; he said he knew this because he’d read up on similar weapons in the library of the Kunstmuseum Basel.

At the very least, Breitwieser had a discerning eye. A typical person may not march into Sotheby’s and decide she must have a small Lucas Cranach the Younger painting. Yet Breitwieser did just this and, to mark his 24th birthday, managed to pick up a Plexiglas dome that held this work, sandwich the small painting between the pages of a catalogue, and secret it out of the auction house during public viewing hours. That painting wound up in the attic of Breitwieser’s mother’s house, where he slept amid all the other works he stole.

The jig was up on November 20, 2001, when, at the Wagner Museum in Lucerne, Switzerland, Breitwieser stowed a 400-year-old bugle beneath his Hugo Boss trench coat. He was arrested, instrument still in tow. It wasn’t the first time the Swiss police had detained him in connection with an art heist, but the last time, he got away with it. This time, he wasn’t so lucky. He was ultimately sentenced to three years in prison.

Finkel seems to believe Breitwieser every step of the way, even when a healthy bit of skepticism is needed. He doesn’t appear to feel quite the same way about Anne-Catherine, who has alleged that Breitwieser abused her, both emotionally and physically, and that he “tormented” her into aiding in his thefts. Finkel does recount one time that Breitwieser hit Anne-Catherine, but by the time she is on the stand, claiming in 2004 that she “didn’t even know he stole art,” Finkel remarks that “Anne-Catherine had stretched the truth, seemingly past snapping, by issuing blanket denials.”

Facts are elusive in The Art Thief, and not only in the places you’d expect. This romanticized account of Breitwieser’s thefts glides over particulars such as the value of the works stolen. Authorities have claimed that Breitwieser obtained well over $1 billion in art, a figure that mysteriously balloons to $2 billion at points in The Art Thief. This is tough to believe because Finkel generally doesn’t provide valuations for individual works. If only Finkel lavished as much attention on these specifics as he did on the screws that bound the cases for each work Breitwieser accessed.

There are also more basic errors, like one in which Finkel states that Pablo Picasso was detained by the French police in connection with the 1911 theft of the Mona Lisa. Actually, it was the poet Guillaume Apollinaire who was detained and later cleared. That Finkel was reportedly fired from the New York Times in 2002 for creating a composite profile subject out of multiple interviews doesn’t help his credibility.

But The Art Thief is really meant more as tasteful pulp than it is as deeply researched non-fiction. At just over 200 pages, it does succeed as a refined beach read that even will engender some of the same questions that good mysteries do.

Why, for example, did Breitwieser do it? It’s true that unlike most art thieves, Breitwieser made few attempts to sell the artworks, which he mostly saved for himself. It’s also true that he did little damage as he took them, except to the works themselves. Some were tossed out windows by Breitwieser, others may have been later destroyed by Breitwieser’s mother, who also received prison time. A number were never recovered.

Because Breitwieser isn’t like most other art thieves, he presents an interesting case. Across the years, analysts have been called in to psychologize both him and Anne-Catherine. (Finkel fails to mention that she did end up receiving a six-month prison sentence for handling stolen goods, instead reporting that she spent “exactly one night in jail” and that the conviction was expunged, “as if nothing had happened during her decade with Breitwieser.”) Breitwieser was determined by one to be “impulsive”; Anne-Catherine lacked “the strength to say no,” according to another. Yet Breitwieser, as one psychotherapist suggests, can’t really be helped because “there’s no criminal psychosis to treat or to cure.”

Whatever the case may be, Breitwieser did make some attempts to absolve himself for the sins he wrought upon museums across France, Germany, and Switzerland. He apologized to curators at trial, and in the book’s final pages, left with little money to his name, he seems to finally express some remorse. “I was a master of the universe,” Breitwieser remarks toward the book’s end. “Now I’m nothing.”

The thievery ring operated for more than two decades at 20 museums and stores across the East Coast United States and parts of the Midwest. According to Karam’s statement, prosecutors believe silver and gold sports memorabilia, including nine of Yogi Berra’s 10 World Series rings, had been melted down into portable discs and sold for hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Eight of the nine accused people turned themselves in to authorities and at least five have entered preliminary plea agreements on charges of theft of art and conspiracy to dispose of major objects of cultural heritage, according to court documents reviewed by the Associated Press. The suspects are Pennsylvania residents. The ninth suspect, 53-year-old Nicholas Dombek, is still sought by police.

One of the earliest thefts was in 2002 at the Everhart Museum in Scranton, Pennsylvania, where the suspects nabbed Pollock’s 1949 painting Springs Winter, then valued at $11.6 million, and a silkscreen by Warhol, titled Le Grande Passion, which was listed in the indictment as being worth $100,000.

“About three years ago, a forensic link at one of the theft sites discovered by a local police agency led us to forensic evidence that linked several of these thefts,” Karam said.