SEMINAR: The Insider's Guide to: Fate of the missing masterpieces

A museum of lost art would contain more objects than all of the world’s museums combined. Only a modest percentage of the artworks created through the ages survive intact today. Some vanished masterpieces are definitely gone: consumed by fire, destroyed by iconoclasts, or fed to pigs. But what stirs the imagination are not the definitive tragedies of artifacts known to have been ruined, but the stories of artworks that are lost – stolen, mislaid, hidden and forgotten – and might be retrieved. A case in point is Leonardo’s Salvator Mundi, missing for centuries, covered in dirt, misattributed, thought all but worthless and now the world’s most expensive artwork. This lecture will explore famous missing masterpieces by artists such as Leonardo, Michelangelo, Caravaggio, Vermeer, Rembrandt, David, and Manet, and examine some of the most notorious heists in history.