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Every now and again, a work of art gets stolen that is famous enough for the world to pay attention. This summer it was Edvard Munch’s The Scream, grabbed in broad daylight from Oslo’s Munch Museum, which hit the international news headlines on 22 August. This was not an isolated incident. Interpol calculates that the annual value of stolen cultural property is exceeded by only three other international criminal activities: drug trafficking, money laundering, and the illegal sale of arms.
Thousands of art objects are reported stolen every year in Europe alone, including paintings, statues, sculptures, clocks, books, glassware, furniture, liturgical items, and a variety of other things. Malta has had its own bad experiences. Caravaggio’s St. Jerome was stolen from the Co-cathedral in Valletta in 1984, cut out of its frame. Luckily, it was tracked down in a local factory two years later and has since been restored. A bronze by Antonio Sciortino, nicked from the Xara Palace in Mdina, unfortunately remains missing. Precious maps have been swiped from the National Library.
As recently as 18 May this year, a moon rock collected by the Apollo 17 mission and given to Malta in 1973 by US President Richard Nixon, was stolen from the Natural History Museum in Mdina. The market value of this currant-sized rock is estimated at around $5 million, almost Lm2 million, according to USAToday reports of the incident. The whereabouts of this small grey rock remain unknown. The only obstacle to taking it out of the Mdina museum was the ticket-seller by the door.
Cultural artefacts have been looted in wars since before the crusades. Maltese history has never forgotten the plunder of church silver by Napoleon’s troops, and its sad sinking to the bottom of the sea soon afterwards. Times have not changed that much; at the beginning of the Iraq war in 2003, thousands of artefacts were looted from the National Museum in Baghdad during the early days of chaos.
Leaving aside the special circumstances of war, art theft has established patterns. The thieves are either commissioned by a wealthy individual to secure the desired piece (which is relatively rare), or they intend to flog it on the market, perhaps together with a couple of forged copies. Sometimes the burglars ransom artefacts back to museums. Yet only a small percentage of stolen objects are ever retrieved.
In April, an important collection of paintings was ransacked in the house of Judge Giovanni Bonello in Valletta. The thieves lifted an iron grating in the poorly-lit street and entered through a cellar. The stolen pictures were soon recovered behind a false wall in a garage in Birkirkara by the police, who are to be congratulated. They appear to have got there just in time as the thieves were planning to destroy a painting attributed to Caravaggio to get rid of the evidence. Hardly art-lovers looking forward to hanging it in their gallery. So what market did they have in mind when they planned their break-in? The thieves seem to have known exactly what they were after, picking only specific pictures from the collection.
Needless to say, a number of our museums and churches are not adequately protected with high-tech security systems. These, and well-trained security personnel, require funds which are in famously short supply. Yet art is big business and huge sums of money can be involved. Precious works on permanent display should not be left vulnerable, although criminals always somehow manage to keep apace of new technology anyway. It is no easy task to both protect artefacts and make them easily accessible to the public at the same time.
Another version of the Edvard Munch painting The Scream (there are four versions in all) was stolen from Norway’s National Art Museum in 1994, on the opening day of the Winter Olympics in Lillehammer nearby. That night, two thieves took hold of a ladder and entered the museum through a window. They took the picture and left a note: “Thanks for the poor security.” I suppose it could happen anywhere.
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