The Wild True Stories Behind History's Greatest Art Thefts (#312)

For centuries, taking art was treated as one of the spoils of victory.

If you had to point to a moment when the world started to see the taking of art not as conquest, but as theft, what point would that be?

If we're talking about large scale and with a European focus for Catholics, it was the Treaty of Tolentino.

The Treaty of Tolentino is when the Papal States surrendered to Napoleon, and there were huge quantities of cultural heritage objects that had to be surrendered to him, and it was effectively stripping the Vatican of its assets.

So that's probably a good point where people really sat up, particularly if Catholics who were upset with the idea that this conqueror, who is himself Catholic, is stripping the Vatican of all of its wealth.

The next step would be World War II, particularly with the Degenerate Art exhibition, the idea that certain works of art are morally corrosive and should be destroyed or captured and put in a sort of circus tent to be mocked to show what the Nazis had saved the world from.

And then this forcible sale of collections from not only Jewish families, but also German families as well.

We tend to forget about that, but Aryan German nationals also had their art collections seized from them, and it was part of the fuel of the Nazi war machine.

And then, of course, at the end of World War II, we had so many objects that were lost, destroyed, or forcibly sold that it became a bigger international issue that really resonated for the contemporary world in the internet era.

Because it, for the first time in the internet era, people who had objects taken from their families could find where they were.

So all of the big lawsuits for repatriation or restoration of looted works during the Nazi era came only when the internet let us see from our living rooms where these objects were and basically who to bring a lawsuit against to try to retrieve them.

So interesting that the internet led to that.