The 5 biggest art loots in history

Benin Bronzes

More than 5,000 magnificent pieces and statues carved from bronze, brass, wood, leather and ivory, created by the Edo peoples since the 13th century, were looted by the British Army in 1897. They were in the royal palace of Benin, an ancient kingdom. At the end of the 19th century, it had a commercial monopoly in present-day Nigeria, the Niger Delta, and was coveted by the British. The murder of a British officer was a pretext for London to send out this punitive expedition, which today is a symbol of looted African art. One of the pieces remained in the British Museum, the rest were dispersed to museums in Western countries or passed into private hands. Claimed repeatedly by Nigeria, Germany returned two of them last July, thus initiating the gradual return of 1,130 of the looted artworks stored in twenty German museums. Also this November, the Horniman Museum in London began returning 72 pieces.

Nazi plunder

The Nazis systematically and organized on a large scale looted works of art – an estimated 600,000 of them – mostly stolen from churches, museums, as well as from Jews who fled or were deported and killed in camps. and the private collections of all the European countries they have occupied, between them blinds.

No more than a mediocre postcard painter rejected by the Academy of Fine Arts in his youth, Hitler planned the construction of a massive museum in Linz, Austria, that would house the Führer’s collection. These valuable works, including many by Picasso, Monet, Cézanne, Matisse, Rodin, Botticelli or Chagall.

Nazi leaders such as Hermann Göring, Joseph Goebbels and Heinrich Himmler confiscated large numbers of people. At the end of the war, a group of allied experts, the ‘memorial men’, whose work was filmed, tried to save and prevent the destruction that the Nazis had foreseen in the face of imminent defeat. It is estimated that between 10,000 and 110,000 people today have not yet been returned to their beneficiaries, most of them already deceased or their heirs.

The famous case was his precious collection of more than 1,200 artifacts discovered in the home of the elder Cornelius Gurlitt in 2012, inherited, according to him, from his father, a merchant authorized to sell goods expropriated by the Nazis.

The plunder of ancient Egypt

Egypt, the cradle of 3,000-year-old treasures of the Pharaonic dynasties and looted by tomb robbers over the centuries, saw Napoleon and his expeditions unscrupulously take away mummies, objects, and Egyptian art that would later feed the rooms of the Paris Louvre and the private collections. Many of these pieces, including the symbolic Rosetta stone found by a Bonaparte soldier in 1799, would be moved to the British Museum in London after the French defeat at the hands of the British.

In the 19th century, when the land of the Nile River was the object of desire of colonial empires, meticulous amateur archaeologists began searching for treasures under the common practice of sand, which is still scattered in Western museums today and is considered normal. In that case. Others, like the Temple of Debod, which was donated to the Spanish by the Egyptian State and transported to Madrid, were legally bought or even given at the time.

The Rosetta stone and the bust of Nefertiti, preserved in the Neues Museum in Berlin (brought to Germany by the archaeologist Ludwig Borchardt in 1912), are the most symbolic artifacts that Egypt has demanded to be returned in recent years. illegally looted.

Franco’s plunder

In the midst of the Civil War, Franco established the Artistic Heritage Confiscation and Preservation Board, under which he was cleared of looting the properties of Republicans who were dead or retaliated in exile. In 1939, in the first post-war period, the National Artistic Heritage Defense Service (Sdpan) was responsible for the management of stolen works, as well as art protected by the Government of the Republic during the war. which had done an original effort to preserve a legacy that was later disguised and demonized by the dictatorship.

Much of the stolen property went into the funds of the Prado Museum or the National Library and adorned churches, parishes, ministries and other public institutions, Professor Arturo Colorado Castellary concluded in his recent ‘Art, spoils of war’ (Cátedra). Francoism is the homes of noble families influenced by the national side or the dictator’s own family.

Few have been returned to their rightful owners.. One example: Only a part of the important collection of hundreds of artifacts from Basque nationalist Ramón de la Sota, which was in the office of Ramón Serrano Suñer, Franco’s brother-in-law and minister, was returned to the family in 1969. .

Parthenon Marbles

Another of the historic artistic claims that seem to be starting to unravel is that of Athens, which has for years asked the British Museum to return the Parthenon friezes and Athenian Acropolis sculptures. At the beginning of the 19th century, between 1801 and 1805, it was bought by Thomas Bruce, the seventh Count of Elgin, a Scottish aristocrat who was the ambassador of the Ottoman Empire in Istanbul, which was then controlling Greece. They were later sold to the United Kingdom.

At the beginning of last December, the head of the British Museum secretly met with Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis to discuss the repatriation of the marbles. Days later, by decree of Pope Francis, the Vatican announced that it would return three parts of the Parthenon, which the Vatican Museums had preserved for centuries, to Greece.