In 1911, the Louvre in Paris hired a man named Vincenzo Perugia to fit some protective glass cases around some of its artworks. Little did they know that Perugia was an Italian petty criminal who had spotted an opportunity. One day he hid himself inside a closet until the other staff had gone home. Then, emerging from his hiding place, Perugia removed the Mona Lisa from its frame and casually strolled out when the Louvre reopened the next morning.

In November 1913, Perugia wrote to an art dealer in Florence called Alfredo Geri under the pseudonym ‘Leonardo Vincenzo’. He travelled to meet him, hiding the masterpiece in the false bottom of a trunk. Geri persuaded the thief to leave the painting with him while he sought the opinion of an expert, before he alerted the authorities and Perugia was promptly arrested.

The "most stolen" artwork of all time, Hubert and Jan van Eyck’s Adoration of the Mystic Lamb, commonly known as the Ghent Altarpiece, was painted in 1432 for St Bavo’s Cathedral in Ghent, Belgium. But the 12-panelled masterpiece by the Van Eyck brothers has attracted thieves many times throughout the centuries. Notably, in the early 1800s, Napoléon Bonaparte took the altarpiece for the Louvre in Paris, and it was only returned to Ghent in 1815 following the Battle of Waterloo. In 1940 it was sent to the Vatican for safekeeping during World War II, but only made it as far as a museum in Pau, France, and in 1942 Adolf Hitler seized the iconic artwork and it was stored in an Austrian saltmine. Three years later the Altarpiece was recovered by a team from the Allied countries' Monuments, Fine Arts, and Archives Program and returned to Belgium.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, this year the theft-prone masterpiece received a new €30 million ($35.4m/£25.6m) bulletproof case home. The new six-metre tall case not only helps deter future thieves, but helps to control the climate around the work, which is especially important as the cathedral can drop to temperatures of 2°C (35.6F) in winter. However it's too late for one part of this masterpiece...

The lower left panel of the Altarpiece was stolen in April 1934 from the St Bavo Cathedral, and remains lost to this day. A ransom demand for one million Belgian francs was received but the authorities refused to pay. A possible culprit, Arsène Goedertier, confessed to the theft on his deathbed in December 1934 but refused to reveal where he had hidden the painting. It remains missing, presumably destroyed. Now protected in its glass case, the Belgian authorities will hope that the rest of the Altarpiece is unlikely to go missing again. 

This artefact was the stone on which Scottish monarchs were crowned. It was stolen by the English on King Edward I’s orders in 1296. But in 1950 a small group of Scottish students decided to recover the Stone from its 'home' in London's Westminster Abbey. They drove to the cathedral and gained access to Poets’ Corner on Christmas Day, removing the Stone and breaking it in two in the process. They eventually transported it back to Glasgow by car.

Painted by Dutch master Jan van Huysum, Vase of Flowers was first displayed in the Uffizi Gallery Florence in 1824, yet it was stolen by the Nazis in 1943. According to the German authorities, the painting hadn’t been looted as part of organised Nazi efforts but simply had been stolen by a soldier. There had been no sign at all of the artwork for almost 50 years, until it re-emerged in 1991 after German reunification.

Yet there were some obstacles involved in returning it to Florence. For one thing, the unidentified German family who had it demanded €2 million in return. Also, German authorities said they couldn’t intervene due to a statute of limitations on crimes more than 30 years old. Fortunately, the German government and the family reached an agreement and, in July 2019, the German government returned the painting to the Uffizi Gallery (pictured).

The Scream is one of the most recognisable artworks in the world. There are actually four versions of it, all painted by Edvard Munch, and two of these have been targeted by thieves. One was stolen from the National Gallery in Oslo in 1994 when robbers scaled a ladder, snuck inside, and left a note that said: “Thanks for the poor security.” Another was taken from the Munch Museum at gunpoint a decade later.

Thankfully, both works were recovered. The first thief held the painting up for ransom, demanding $1 million for its return, but a major undercover sting operation saw the work retrieved within a few months without this being paid. The second Scream was recovered, along with another Munch painting Madonna, a couple of years after the theft, although it had suffered some water damage.

Given its history, Rome has always been ripe for plundering. One example is from the 1980s when two priceless 2nd-century works, a marble head of the god Dionysus and a headless statue of a toga-clad god known as the Torlonia Peplophoros, were stolen from the Villa Torlonia gallery.

Both treasures were finally tracked down after decades of vigorous detective work. The Dionysus head was due to come under the hammer at Christie’s in New York in 2002, but was returned to the Villa Torlonia in 2006. The toga-clad figure was given back during a high-profile repatriation ceremony in December 2016.

The 1970 painting Tres Personajes had been snapped up at a Sotheby’s modern art sale in 1977. Ten years later, the artwork was found to have vanished from the storage warehouse where the owners had left the piece for safekeeping. Detectives hunted for the painting for decades to no avail, but luckily an unsuspecting passer-by had a little more luck…

Elizabeth Gibson (pictured) stumbled across the abandoned painting on her morning walk around Manhattan’s Upper West Side in 2003. Gibson was no art expert but she took a shining to the painting lying among the trash, and decided to display it in her home for several months – it was only on a friend’s suggestion that she got the painting assessed and its true value was revealed. The stolen piece was finally returned to its rightful owner and then went on to sell for $1,049,000 (£535k) at auction in 2007. Gibson received a $15,000 (£7.6k) reward for her help, as well as an undisclosed percentage of the auction money.

In the 1920s, the buyer tried to sell the Bill back to North Carolina, but officials insisted it was government property and refused. Another offer to sell it back to the state was made by an anonymous seller in 1995, which the state once again refused. But when an attempt was made to sell the document for $4 million (£2.5m) to Philadelphia Museum in 2003, FBI agents stepped in and seized the Bill. A court declared it the official property of North Carolina.

The Whitworth Art Gallery in Manchester, England saw three of its most famous works stolen in 2003 – prized paintings by Pablo Picasso, Vincent Van Gogh, and Paul Gauguin. They were noted as missing on 23 April after thieves entered the building overnight in an undetected raid. White spaces on the walls greeted the guards the next morning. The paintings were worth, in total, around $5 million (£4m).

A rather modern treasure, this near-mint condition copy of Action Comics No. 1 from 1938, which featured the first appearance of Superman, was stolen from Hollywood actor Nicolas Cage's Los Angeles home in 2000, five years after he bought it. The actor received insurance money for the theft, and never expected to see it again.

At the time of its disappearance in 2008, the robbery of The Boy in the Red Vest by Paul Cézanne from a private Zürich museum was one of the biggest art thefts in Europe. Worth about $91 million (£74m), the Impressionist painting from 1888 was stolen in a spectacular heist along with three other masterpieces, including Monet's Poppy field at Vetheuil and Van Gogh's Blossoming Chestnut Branches, by three armed men. The masked robbers even made the staff lie down on the floor before taking the collection's most valuable pieces.

Painted by French Impressionist Pierre-Auguste Renoir in 1879, Paysage Bords de Seine was reported missing in 1951 and appeared around 60 years later at a flea market in West Virginia in 2009 with no indication of where it had been for six decades. Not knowing what she had resurfaced, Marcia Fuqua bought the valuable artwork along with a plastic cow and a Paul Bunyan doll for only $7.

Fuqua later said she liked the frame of the napkin-size painting. Even though a nameplate said "Renoir 1841-1919", she didn't think the painting was genuine and stored it in a rubbish bag for more than two years before having it valued. To her frustration, in 2014 a federal judge ruled that the painting had to be returned to the museum it was stolen from in 1951 and the FBI handed it over to the Baltimore Museum of Art, where it's now on display again.

In 2015, former collector and part-time art sleuth Arthur Brand spectacularly recovered the steeds. They were up for sale, so Brand posed as a millionaire, Mr Moss, a Texan oil dealer that he based on Dallas television character J R Ewing. While the middleman for the sale stalled, Brand and police followed other leads, eventually locating the horses in Bad Dürkheim in a raid that resulted in a further 30 artworks being seized.

Now read about the treasures Nazis stole that are sitting in plain sight

Two Van Gogh paintings that were stolen from the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam in a heist in 2002 were finally found in a farmhouse near Naples, Italy in 2016. View of the Sea at Scheveningen (1882) (pictured) and Congregation leaving the Reformed Church in Nuenen (1884-85) were found in a box that had been hidden behind a wall in a toilet of the farmhouse. The paintings weren't the only assets seized by Italian police, who took possession of €20 million ($23.8m/£17.4m)-worth of goods, including a small plane, apartments and villas, which they contend belong to two alleged Camorra drug kingpins. 

Two paintings by two well-known masters – Adolescence by Salvador Dalí and La Musicienne by Tamara de Lempicka – were stolen in 2009 from the Scheringa Museum of Realist Art in Spanbroek in the Netherlands. Masked gunmen entered the museum in broad daylight and made off in a car with the works. Together they were valued at more than $8.5 million (£6.5m).

Worth an estimated $160 million (£130m) today, Willem de Kooning's Woman-Ochre was missing for more than 30 years after it had been cut out of its frame at the University of Arizona Museum of Art in Tucson in 1985. At the time the museum had no security cameras. However, the expressionist oil painting was later recovered in the New Mexico bedroom of two former schoolteachers, Jerry and Rita Alter, after Rita died in 2017 (Jerry passed away five years earlier in 2012).

No-one knows exactly how the painting ended up in the home of the quiet, unassuming couple (pictured), but the two were photographed in Tucson the night before the heist. They also resemble sketches of the suspects that the investigators released at the time.

These sparkling shoes are among the most valuable memorabilia items in movie history. The ruby slippers were famously worn by actress Judy Garland in the 1939 fantasy musical The Wizard of Oz. However, in 2005 one of the seven pairs made for the film was stolen from the Judy Garland Museum in Grand Rapids, Minnesota. The thief had broken in through a window late at night.

Missing since 1993, this 18th-century Ethiopian bronze crown was recently handed back to the Ethiopian government. It was discovered by political refugee Sirak Asfaw, who had fled the country for the Netherlands in the 1970s, in the suitcase of another refugee who was staying in his Rotterdam flat in 1998. The crown features images of Christ and the 12 apostles and there are thought to be just 12 in existence.

In 2004, these two Visigothic carvings dating back to the 7th century were stolen from the Santa Maria de Lara church in northern Spain. The priceless reliefs, each weighing about 110lbs (50kg), were tracked down by Dutch art detective Arthur Brand in 2019 to an English nobleman's garden, covered in mud and leaves after being used as ornaments.

Swedish royal jewels have been targeted by criminals on more than one occasion. In July 2018, two thieves ran into Strängnäs cathedral near Stockholm to grab an orb and two crowns which once belonged to 17th-century monarchs Karl IX and Queen Christina. These priceless pieces made up the king’s funeral regalia in 1611. After nabbing the items, the thieves cycled to a speedboat standing by at a nearby lake and made a swift getaway.

In February 2019, the items were recovered from a rubbish bin in a suburb of Stockholm. They had been dumped among other waste despite being composed of gold, pearls, and precious stones. The bin was marked ‘bomb’ and placed on top of a car, which brought it to immediate attention. A 22-year-old man was jailed for four years after his DNA was found on the jewels and he confessed to the theft.

Discover America's incredible lost treasures waiting to be discovered

However, in 2019 the police department got a call from someone at an auction house in Southern California saying that he recognised some of the paintings on the department's website. This led the police to recover as many as 100 paintings and artefacts. They are currently in the process of identifying the individual pieces, and hope to reunite the lost treasures with their former owners in the future.

In 1958, extensive restoration work took place on the world-famous Stonehenge stones in England. On completing his part of the work excavation team member Robert Phillips decided to take a piece of the prehistoric monument with him. Phillips left with a 108-centimetre core from one of the sarsen stones, which had been drilled out so that metal rods could be inserted to keep the stones upright. Phillips then took the 5,000-year-old slither of stone to America when he emigrated in 1976 and experts assumed the core was gone for good...

The night before his 90th birthday in 2019, Phillips told family members that it was time to return the piece of Stonehenge, which he had been displaying in his office for the last 60 years. His sons Robin and Lewis delivered the core, which had been kept in pristine condition,  themselves. Two other drilled-out cores remain missing, but archaeologists will be able to analyse the returned core for further clues as to the sarsen stones’ origin.

Another success for art detective Arthur Brand (pictured right), this 1938 painting was stolen from Sheikh Abdul Mohsen Abdulmalik al-Sheikh’s yacht 20 years ago. The boat was moored just off Antibes in 1999, which is where Picasso famously once lived. The colourful masterpiece was usually protected by an alarm system, along with other high price works, but was removed to an on-board bank vault during a party. When it was opened, the picture was gone.

A reward of €400,000 was immediately offered, and investigators began looking for clues. Several fakes were offered in return for the cash. But it wasn’t until 2019 that Arthur Brand managed to return the piece. He had been trailing the $28 million (£21.4m) masterpiece for 20 years when it was anonymously sent to his home. As he unpeeled two plastic bags he knew it was, finally, the real deal. “You know it’s a Picasso because there is some magic coming off it,” he said.

Discover the people who bought homes and found treasure

In December 2019 gardeners at Galleria d’Arte Moderna Ricci Oddi gallery in Piacenza, Italy made a strange discovery. As they cleared ivy from the gallery's exterior walls, they came across a painting hidden in an alcove which had been concealed by a metal panel. The painting was in good condition, and immediately experts suspected it was a 1917 work by Austrian painter Gustav Kilmt called Portrait of a Lady (pictured) that had been stolen from the gallery more than 20 years before.

The painting was authenticated as a genuine Klimt (pictured in a photograph from 1914 by Josef Anton Trčka) in January 2020, meaning that, although it had been taken from the gallery walls in February 1997, it had never actually left the gallery's grounds. However, while the painting, which Klimt finished the year before he died in 1918, has been recovered, the story behind its theft remains a mystery. Investigators are now examining organic material found on the recovered canvas in the hope it will reveal the truth.

The Rembrandt’s Light exhibition at Dulwich Picture Gallery in London was put together in 2019 to display 35 of the Dutch master’s paintings 350 years after his death. A thief targeted two of these iconic artworks in what police described as an “audacious” burglary and attacked an officer with an unknown substance from a canister to escape with the paintings…

Many of the stolen artworks featured in this round-up were eventually found in different cities or even different countries from where they were taken, but the two stolen Rembrandts didn’t make it quite so far. These paintings were quickly recovered from their hiding place among bushes within the gallery grounds and have since made their way back to their original galleries: the Louvre and Washington’s National Gallery of Art .

In January 2020, the descendants of a Jewish lawyer and art collector were finally reunited with artworks that had been stolen by Nazis during the occupation of France during World War II. The collection was returned to Armand Dorville’s family by the German government, and was made up of a drawing by Dutch-born French artist Constantin Guys (pictured), and two paintings by Jean-Louis Forain, Dame en robe du soir (Woman in an evening gown) and Portrait d'une dame (Portrait of a woman).

The story of Dorville’s collection is not an uncommon one, as some 100,000 artworks were stolen from their owners during the Nazi occupation of France between 1940 and 1944. Others have undergone court battles to retrieve their ancestors’ looted pieces, including Claire Touchard (pictured) who was finally able to claim three André Derain paintings stolen from her grandfather, Jewish art collector René Gimpel, after a court ruling was overturned in September 2020. The artworks were taken in 1944 when Gimpel was arrested by Nazi soldiers, and tragically the collector died the following year at the Neuengamme concentration camp in Hamburg, Germany.

Back in 2017, more than £2.5 million ($3.2m)-worth of irreplaceable books were stolen from a transit warehouse in London. The five-hour heist was like a scene from a spy film, with two criminals drilling holes in the ceiling and abseiling down into the building to snatch the collection of 200 books. The men stashed the books in 16 holdall bags, and escaped with the help of a third man assigned the job of getaway driver. The crime scene was soon discovered, and police forces across Europe pulled together to begin the hunt for the books and their thieves...

A three-year investigation ensued in an attempt to find the collection, which included rare first editions by the likes of Sir Isaac Newton and Galileo. Their hiding place? A cement pit beneath a house in Romania. In Septmber 2020, the perpetrators were revealed to be members of an organised crime group, and 13 men have since been charged while the books have been safely recovered.

In September 2020, burglars stole a highly-coveted calligraphy scroll written by the founder of the People’s Republic of China, Mao Zedong. The manuscript was on display at renowned art collector Fu Chunxiao’s home when it was taken by three men who had broken into the property. Among other pieces taken were antique stamps, copper coins and other writings by Mao, bringing the value of the stolen goods to a reported HK$5 billion ($645m/£498m). 

The thieves sold the scroll to a Hong Kong-based art collector for just HK$500 ($64/£50). He actually thought that it was fake, but got in contact with police once the appeal for information on the burglary went public. The manuscript was returned to Fu, but sadly not in its original condition – at some point during the theft the 2.8 metre-long parchment was deemed too long to display, and so it was cut in half. This has likely dented the scroll's previous estimated value of $300 million (£231m). One of the suspected burglars has been arrested, but the other two have yet to be found…

In the mid-1970s, 15 African-American women worked together to produce a quilt to teach people about Black history for the 1976 Bicentennial celebration, an event celebrating and remembering the events that led up to America's independence. Each block of the quilt represents a key event, person or group, starting in 1492 with Black Spanish explorer Pedro Alonso Niño, and ending at the passing of the Civil Rights Act in 1964. The quilt was being exhibited at The Oregon Historical Society in Portland while the city was still experiencing huge amounts of unrest following country-wide protests after the killing of George Floyd back in May last year. During one night in October the Society building was raided and vandalised, and the history-rich commemorative quilt was taken…

Thankfully the priceless quilt was recovered just a few blocks away. While it was still in one piece, it had been left out in the rain, which had caused some of the colours to run. The Oregon Historical Society is no longer exhibiting the quilt as it tries to restore it to its former glory, and repairing the vandalism to the museum as a whole will cost around $25,000 (£19.3k). In place of displaying the quilt, the museum hosted virtual events featuring the one remaining member of the original quilting group, Sylvia Gates Carlisle, to discuss its significance and what it represents. 

The ancient city of Pompeii is one of Italy’s most-visited spots, and over the years visitors have sometimes taken much more than photos of the historic site. Fragments of stone are often stolen by light-fingered tourists, but many are later returned when visitors’ consciences catch up with them. In October 2020, one such tourist sent a package of pieces she had stolen to a travel agent in Pompeii… 

The Canadian woman, known only as Nicole, sent a letter along with the artefacts explaining that the pieces were cursed, and that she had had non-stop bad luck since stealing them in 2005. She returned two mosaic tiles, parts of an amphora and pieces of ceramics in the package, and blamed the relics’ “negative energy” for years of poor health and financial problems. In her note to the travel agent, Nicole also said that she was sending the pieces back because she didn’t want to “pass this curse on” to her family or children, reported The Guardian.

In a similar case, the Museo Nazionale Romano in Rome, Italy received a chunk of marble in the post in November last year after an American tourist regretted having stolen it in 2017. The sender, identified as “Jess”, had taken the stone back to Atlanta, Georgia and presumably gifted it to someone called Sam, as the words “To Sam, love Jess, Rome” were still visible in black marker on the marble, despite obvious attempts to wash them off. 

Included with the marble was a note explaining how sorry Jess was for having taken the stone in the first place, describing her actions as “thoughtless and despicable”. Stephane Verger, the director of the museum, was moved by her decision to return the stolen piece of history and described it as “a very important symbolic gesture”.

Another item returned to its rightful home at the end of 2020 was a large brass key for St Leonard’s Tower in Kent, England. It had been missing for almost half a century. The tower, which was built between 1077 and 1108, had long since had its locks changed, but the key remains an important part of its history. 

The brass key was sent to the organisation English Heritage, which protects historic places across the UK, along with a note that read: “Borrowed 1973, Returned 2020”. The sender remains anonymous but the organisation is offering a free membership to encourage the mystery thief to get in touch. 

This January a family from Bordeaux in western France hired investigators to explore the provenance of some armour they had inherited. These investigators soon revealed that the Renaissance-era armour, which was made in Milan, was in fact the treasure that had been taken from the Louvre more than 40 years ago. Estimated to be worth $600,000 (£430k), the pieces will go on display once again when the Louvre reopens in October. Police are now investigating who may have stolen them in the first place, and how they came to be in Bordeaux. The mystery continues for now...

The French government has announced that it will return the only Gustav Klimt painting in its national collection to the Jewish family it was stolen from by the Nazis back in 1938. The 1905 painting, Rosebushes Under the Trees, has been displayed in the Musée d’Orsay in Paris since 1980 when it was bought at auction. French culture minister Roselyne Bachelot (pictured with the painting) said the authorities weren't aware it had been stolen by the Nazis until recently.

The oil painting will be returned to the family of Nora Stiasny, who was a victim of the Holocaust. “The decision to return a major work from the public collections illustrates our commitment to the duty of justice and reparation vis-a-vis plundered families,” French culture minister Roselyne Bachelot said. France has been trying to reunite stolen artworks with the families of those they were taken from.

Since 1957 Scotland's University of Aberdeen has been in possession of a bronze depicting Oba, King of Benin. However, following a review it discovered that the historical treasures had been taken from Benin, now southern Nigeria, in “extremely immoral” circumstances in 1897, when British troops looted the city. Now the stolen masterpiece is set to be sent back to Benin. Alhaji Lai Mohammed, Nigeria’s minister of information and culture, took the opportunity to encourage other institutions to follow Aberdeen's lead: “Other holders of Nigerian antiquity ought to emulate this to bring fairness to the burning issue of repatriation". But it's not the only examples of these stolen bronzes that's been returned recently...

Berlin's Ethnological Museum is set to return 440 Benin bronzes to Nigeria this year. Half of the collection was meant to go on display at a new museum in Berlin, the Humboldt Forum, later in 2021, but it will now go ahead with replicas so that the stolen treasures can be returned to their rightful home. The bronzes came to Europe in the same looting by British soldiers in 1897. And the Church of England has announced it will be returning two Benin bronzes to Nigeria that had been gifted in 1982 to Robert Runcie, the Archbishop of Canterbury at the time. The move to return the treasure from Berlin and several UK institutions puts great pressure on London's British Museum and Oxford's Pitt Rivers Museum, both of which still house Benin bronzes. In fact, the British Museum (pictured) has the single largest collection of them. After many requests the British Museum sold 30 of the artefacts back to the Nigerian government between 1950 and 1972, and more recently both museums have engaged in talks about Nigeria's looted treasure. That said, to date they have only agreed to hand over the stolen treasures as part of rotating loans.

Now read: Will these legendary lost treasures be found in 2021?