Results for “renaissance”
The Theft of the Cellini Salt Cellar
Benvenuto Cellini's golden Saliera — the only surviving gold sculpture by the Renaissance master — was stolen from Vienna in 2003 and recovered three years later, buried in a lead box in an Austrian forest.
The 1911 Theft of the Mona Lisa
On the morning of 21 August 1911, the Mona Lisa vanished from the walls of the Louvre. For twenty-eight months it was gone — and in its absence it became an icon.
Alceo Dossena
Italian sculptor whose 'ancient' and Renaissance-style works fooled major museums including the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Boston's Museum of Fine Arts. He claimed he never intended fraud — blaming the dealers who aged and sold his sculptures as genuine antiquities.
Icilio Federico Joni
Sienese painter known as the 'prince of forgers' for his convincing early-Renaissance panel paintings and gilded works. Unusually, he wrote a candid memoir about his craft, making him one of the first forgers to document the trade from the inside.
Giovanni Bastianini
Italian sculptor whose Renaissance-style busts were sold as authentic 15th-century works, one entering the Louvre before the deception unravelled in a famous 1860s controversy over whether such skill could be called mere forgery.
Mona Lisa
Leonardo's enigmatic portrait, likely of Lisa Gherardini. Its 1911 theft — and the two years it spent missing — turned a well-regarded Renaissance panel into the most recognized painting on earth.
Serial Vandal Meets the Renaissance
In April 1988 a serial vandal Hans-Joachim Bolhmann hurled sulfuric acid at Albrecht Dürer's 'Mater Dolorosa', a central panel of the Seven Sorrows Polyptych, permanently damaging parts of the 500-year-old work.
The Princess, the Madonna, and a Wild Water Fight
A 19-year-old man allegedly hurled water at two centuries-old paintings — Ingres' 'The Princesse de Broglie' and Girolamo dai Libri's 'Madonna and Child with Saints' — and tore tapestries from the walls during a bizarre outburst at the Met.
Moretto's Double Disaster
A visitor lost her footing and punched a hand clean through a double-sided sixteenth-century processional banner by the Renaissance master Moretto — damaging both painted faces at once.
Climate Activists Meet the Goddess
Activists from Ultima Generazione attached photographs of the 2023 Tuscan floods to the protective glass over Botticelli's 'The Birth of Venus', calling for action on climate disasters.