This incredible story that emerges that shows Cellini's skill as a fighter.

There's a lot to unpack here, but if we go back in time and pull out macroscopically just a little bit, Charles V, the Holy Roman Emperor, had sent Charles III, the Duke of Bourbon, through the papal states with an army.

And the army had been underpaid, underfed, and the Duke of Bourbon was having trouble controlling the soldiers.

And it seems to be a combination of a mutiny and Charles III saying, "Okay, let's do this," that they wound up actually attacking Rome.

And why did they do that? Part of the problem was that a large constituency of that army were German Lutherans, some of them Landsknechte, which were high-end mercenaries.

So they didn't have this idea that it was illogically inappropriate to attack the Vatican and the Pope.

And they were pillaging in the center of Rome.

What happened?

Walk us through what happened and how something so obvious worked.

Well, if I'm allowed to say that I was impressed by a theft, this is one where the audacity of it was what made them get away with it, at least initially.

So what happened earlier this fall was that a small team of thieves stole a cherry picker.

They also stole some construction equipment, and they wore high-visibility vests, so they were doing the opposite of what most people think of when they're thinking about stealing something.

You think of being stealthy and avoiding detection as you enter and as you leave.

They didn't worry about that.

They were so brazen that nobody felt that they were in the wrong place.

How does someone walk into the Louvre and steal the Mona Lisa?

So how do you think about these two things? Do you have a synthesis that you think works between these two? Or do you have like a grand unifying theory that helps you rationalize art crime and how it has developed across

history? It's a great question, and it's a double-barreled question, as you suggest.

So to begin with, let's look at the role of art in conflicts.

So when I teach the history of art crime, I usually go back to 212 BC, which is the Roman Republican army's sack of the city of Siracusa in Sicily.

And that's a good point of departure because it's an early touchstone that launched a craze for collecting.

But it was also a moment when a conquering army captured cultural heritage objects, as we would call them today, and brought them back as war booty.

It wasn't the first time, but it's a good point to look back to.

This might be quite outside our strict definition of art, but are there any historical antecedents or precedents that we have for this development?