Grand Theft Museum - The biggest burglaries in history - part 1
Sunday morning, the Louvre lost priceless treasures in seven minutes. This isn't the first time. These are the stories that came before.
This Sunday, 19 October 2025, at half past nine in the morning, a four-person commando gained entry to the Louvre via a cherry picker, cut through the windows of the Galerie d’Apollon with an angle grinder, smashed two high-security display cases and made off with eight imperial jewels in precisely seven minutes.
Among the haul: Empress Eugénie’s diadem set with nearly 2,000 diamonds, Queen Marie-Amélie’s sapphire necklace containing 631 diamonds, and Marie-Louise’s emerald necklace with its 1,138 diamonds. Empress Eugénie’s crown, composed of 1,354 diamonds and 56 emeralds, was found damaged near the museum. The criminals vanished on scooters. The museum has closed its doors.
This spectacular theft revives a question: how can priceless works disappear from the world’s best-guarded institutions? The history of major museum heists offers a troubling answer. For over a century, audacious individuals have defied security systems, sometimes with disconcerting ease. Here are the robberies that have marked the art world.
1911, Paris: The Mona Lisa Vanishes from the Louvre
On Monday morning, 21 August 1911, Vincenzo Peruggia walks through the empty galleries of the Louvre. He wears the white smock of the employees. Nobody notices him. At 29, this Italian glazier has already worked here, installing glass protections over the paintings. He knows the place by heart.
Around seven o’clock, Peruggia finds himself alone before the Mona Lisa in the Salon Carré. The portrait of Mona Lisa is not yet the icon it will become. It is a renowned work, certainly, but of middling fame. Its modest size makes it easy to handle. A determining criterion.
Peruggia unhooks the painting. He carries it into a service staircase. There, hidden from view, he removes the glass panel he himself installed. He takes the wooden panel from its frame. He slips the painting beneath his smock. A few minutes later, he leaves the museum calmly through a service door. No alarm sounds. In 1911, the Louvre has no electronic security system. Only a handful of guards watch over the rooms. This Monday morning, they are few and far between.
The theft is not discovered until 22 August. A copyist looks for the painting, sees an empty space. A guard finds the abandoned frame in the stairwell. The French government offers 40,000 francs as a reward. The museum remains shut for a week. Unprecedented.
Guillaume Apollinaire features briefly among the suspects. Pablo Picasso too. The police question them briefly. No evidence links them to the theft. The investigation stalls. For two years, the public flocks to the Louvre to contemplate a bare wall. This absence gradually transforms the painting into legend.
Peruggia lives in a modest flat in the 10th arrondissement. He hides the Mona Lisa in a false-bottomed trunk beneath his bed. In September 1911, an inspector comes to question him at home. Peruggia had worked at the museum. But the officer does not search under the bed. The thief keeps the masterpiece for over two years. His stated motive is not money. He considers himself a patriot returning the painting to Italy. He believes Napoleon plundered it. False: Leonardo da Vinci brought it to France in the service of Francis I in the sixteenth century.
In December 1913, Peruggia contacts a Florentine antiques dealer, Alfredo Geri. He signs his letters “Leonard”. He claims to possess the Mona Lisa. On 10 December, he unrolls the canvas before Geri and the director of the Uffizi. They authenticate the original. They convince Peruggia to leave them the painting for examination. The police intervene immediately.
The painting is exhibited triumphantly at the Uffizi. Then Italy returns it to France. On 4 January 1914, the Mona Lisa comes home to the Louvre welcomed by an immense crowd, to the sound of a military brass band. Peruggia is sentenced in Italy to just over a year in prison, reduced to seven months on appeal. He is released the day after the verdict. In his home village, many regard him as a naïve patriot.
This theft did more for the painting’s glory than any critic ever could. Through the investigation’s media coverage, Mona Lisa’s face entered the global collective imagination. Leonardo would doubtless have been surprised to see this portrait become an object of worldwide devotion because of a burglary.
1934, Ghent: The Mystic Lamb Disappears
On 11 April 1934, a guard at Saint Bavo’s Cathedral in Ghent discovers that a panel from the Ghent Altarpiece has vanished. This fifteenth-century polyptych, a masterpiece by the Van Eyck brothers, is a cornerstone of Flemish heritage. The stolen wing depicts the Just Judges.
The following day, a ransom of one million Belgian francs is demanded. As proof of good faith, the abductor returns another panel he had also removed. The Church and the State refuse to pay. In November 1934, a man named Arsène Goedertier confesses on his deathbed to being the thief. But he dies without revealing the precise location. He leaves only a cryptic note.
Despite searches spanning decades, the panel has never been recovered. It remains missing to this day, replaced by a copy. This unsolved theft endures as one of the most celebrated mysteries in the history of stolen art.
1961, London: The Duke of Wellington on the Run
In August 1961, the United Kingdom has just acquired at great expense a Goya portrait, the Portrait of the Duke of Wellington. The British state paid £140,000 to prevent the painting’s export to the United States. It displays it proudly at the National Gallery.
On the night of 20 to 21 August, an intruder scales scaffolding behind the museum. He takes advantage of a lavatory window left ajar. Inside, the painting rests on an easel, surrounded by a simple cordon. The man need only unhook it. Within minutes, he exits the way he came and flees by car. It is the first time a painting has been stolen from the National Gallery.
The mysterious thief sends a letter demanding that the government give £140,000 to a charitable cause to pay television licences for impoverished elderly people. He does not seek to sell the Goya for his own profit. He casts himself as a modern Robin Hood. Public opinion is fascinated. In 1962, the James Bond film Dr No slips in a knowing reference showing the portrait adorning the villain’s lair.
The thief keeps the work hidden at home in a wardrobe for nearly four years. In 1965, a 61-year-old man, Kempton Bunton, a retired taxi driver, presents himself to the police. He confesses to being the author of the theft. He claims he always intended to return the painting. A few weeks earlier, he sent instructions enabling its recovery. The Goya is found intact in a left-luggage office at Birmingham station.
At trial, for want of material proof that he himself took the object, Bunton is acquitted of stealing the painting. But he is sentenced to three months in prison for stealing the frame. Only in 2012 do the archives reveal that in fact, the deed had been carried out by his 20-year-old son, John Bunton. The father had shouldered all responsibility. This theft would trigger a complete overhaul of security in British museums.
1969, Palermo: The Caravaggio Nativity Swallowed by Night
On the night of 17 to 18 October 1969, in Palermo, Sicily, intruders break into the Oratory of San Lorenzo. They attack the Nativity with St Francis and St Lawrence, a monumental painting by Caravaggio executed around 1609. This canvas, nearly three metres by two, depicts the Virgin and Child in a dark stable. It is one of the master’s final works.
No night watchman or alarm system protects the Caravaggio. The criminals proceed with brutality. They cut the canvas with a Stanley knife, separating it from the frame. Come morning, only the emptied stretcher remains. The shock is immense. The Italian state creates a specialised unit of carabinieri for the protection of artistic heritage.
Suspicions turn towards the Cosa Nostra. Investigators obtain information about the presumed perpetrators and the Mafia family that allegedly took possession of the painting. But through the 1970s, the leads evaporate. The Nativity disappears into the limbo of the black market.
A few months after the theft, the oratory’s priest receives an anonymous letter proposing to negotiate its return. Shortly after, he receives a tiny fragment of the stolen canvas to prove the blackmailers indeed hold the painting. It is the method of hostage-takers. The authorities refuse to yield to blackmail.
In 2018, a Mafia informer confirms that the canvas had been held by the boss Gaetano Badalamenti, who likely spirited it away to Switzerland. Other sources suggest it may have been destroyed in the late 1980s, when Mafiosi were eliminating incriminating evidence. The Caravaggio Nativity has never resurfaced. A high-resolution reproduction was installed in 2015 to fill the void.
1972, Montreal: 18 Paintings in 90 Minutes
On 4 September 1972, around half past midnight, three masked individuals exploit roofing works to break in through the skylight of the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. They descend using ropes. Armed with pistols, they surprise the three night guards and tie them up.
A methodical pillage then begins. In 90 minutes, they select 18 Old Master paintings. Among the stolen canvases are a Rembrandt landscape, works by Delacroix, Rubens, Corot, a Bruegel the Elder, a Gainsborough. They also take 39 pieces of silverware and jewellery. The criminals leave the museum through a service door and vanish into the night.
This burglary, dubbed the “Skylight Caper”, remains to this day the largest in Canadian history. It occurs over the Labour Day weekend. Many officials are on holiday. The news is dominated by an arson attack three days earlier and by the attack on Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics on 5 September. The theft goes almost unnoticed by the general public.
Investigators note that the thieves knew of temporary exhibitions that had brought together certain of these works. Evidence of meticulous preparation. Shortly after the theft, the museum receives Polaroid photographs of several stolen paintings. The thieves even return the Bruegel as a negotiating gesture. But an infiltration operation falls through. An attempted ransom in exchange for payment of $250,000 fails.
Despite years of effort, none of the 18 stolen canvases has been recovered. The Rembrandt is valued today at over $20 million. The Montreal museum affair remains an unsolved mystery.
👉 To be continued tomorrow in Part 2: from Boston to Rotterdam, the heists of the twenty-first century.
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