Similarly, the works by Vermeer, Manet, Rembrandt, and others stolen from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston were thought, Charney says, to have been impossible to sell. “The gap of over three years between the theft and the first ransom demand suggests,” he writes, “that the thieves originally tried to find a buyer for the works, or had a buyer but that the deal fell through, after which they turned to ransom.”
The Art of War
Some of the greatest art losses have involved war. After winning the first Jewish-Roman War in 70 A.D., the Romans stripped the Temple of Herod in Jerusalem. France’s Napoleon Bonaparte maintained a military unit devoted to art theft— the first ever, Charney claims. And at the end of the Second Opium War in 1860, British and French armies looted Beijing’s Old Summer Palace, an exquisite, 860-acre compound of palaces and gardens. Soon after, the 8th Earl of Elgin ordered his troops to burn it to the ground, obliterating an almost inconceivably grand collection of priceless art and architecture. It took several days, Charney writes, for the palace to burn.
In what’s probably the most wrenching anecdote in the book, Charney details the looting and ultimate destruction of the statue of Zeus at Olympia—one of the ancient wonders of the world.
Built in around 430 B.C., the massive, ivory-plated statue was built over a wooden framework. The figure, which was said to dwarf visitors to the temple, sat on a massive throne, clad in a golden robe covered in a relief of animals and lilies and clutching a massive golden scepter. The Roman Emperor Caligula (who reigned from 37 A.D. to 41 A.D.) “had designs on the statue,” Charney writes, but “fortunately, he was assassinated” before he could transport it to Rome.
Instead, the statue was looted from the temple and ended up in Constantinople. It almost certainly was destroyed in 475 A.D., when a fire engulfed the palace in which it was displayed.
A Warning
The parallels between the destruction of artifacts in the days of yore and the destruction currently being inflicted on historical monuments by Islamic State and the Taliban are painfully clear. Charney spends some time on Islamic State’s obliteration in Iraq of Nimrud, a 3,500-year-old Assyrian city, and mentions the monumental, 1,700-year-old statues of Buddha that the Taliban dynamited at Bamiyan, Afghanistan, in 2001. (For anyone with a masochistic streak, a video of the statues’ destruction released by NATO is genuinely gut-wrenching.)
And that leads us to the takeaway from Charney’s book. It’s not, as he’d have us believe, that we’re missing out on what once was. The real point is that if we’re not careful, whatever’s left—the embarrassment of riches that currently exhausts us in the Louvre, the Uffizi, the Prado, and the Met—can all be taken away, too.
This article was provided by Bloomberg News.