Word: theft
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...Cambridge Police arrested three men last week in connection with the November theft of over $200,000 worth of art objects from the Cambridge home of Stuart C. Welch Jr. '50, honorary curator of Indian and Islamic Art in the Fogg Museum and lecturer on Fine Arts...
...with his vision of a sublimely abstract order dwelling in a thicket of concrete and manifest forms-figures, architecture, drapery; and because there were so few known paintings by him (apart from the great fresco cycle in Arezzo), the night's work in Urbino seemed less of a theft than a lobotomy. "The theft of the Raphael and the Piero della Francesca masterpieces is a loss beyond measurement," said Italy's leading art historian and critic Giulio Carlo Argan. "It's as though all the existing copies of Dante's Divine Comedy and the verses...
Italy has the dubious distinction of suffering more thefts than any other nation. Clearly the pattern has changed, having moved from the spontaneous to the corporate. Rodolfo Siviero, the government's chief investigator of art theft, roundly states that "it's an international traffic conducted by a number of big-time receivers abroad." These 50 or so men, he believes, are not art dealers but organizers of what amounts to theft-for-investment. They commission thefts, receive the goods, wait for them to cool (for years, if need be) and then discreetly launder them through a network...
Cranks and Bunkers. For this scenario, the Milan theft would be ideal -minor works by famous names, such as Cézanne's Thieves and the Donkey (see color page), that not one person in 10,000 would remember seeing on the museum wall years before. The chains of documentation for sales of art works are still remarkably weak. But sometimes a thief blunders and takes something unsalably famous. Siviero claims this is what happened in 1971, with the theft of Masaccio's Madonna with Child and Memling's Portrait of a Gentleman from Palazzo Vecchio...
...discussing art is its price; by collectors who grub for investment; and by the horde of dealers, ranging from the little sharks to the dignified auction-room gents with faces like silver teapots, who have striven to give art the primary function of bullion. The present epidemic of art theft is ultimately their responsibility. In one day last week, in one Italian district-the Abruzzi-thieves made off with a 12th century Madonna and Child, a 13th century reclining Madonna and a 14th century silver reliquary attributed to Giacomo di Sulmona. In the whole week more than 180 works...