Rembrandt with van Gogh looks on helplessly as the army of liberation emancipates his masterpieces at the point of a gun.The earliest documented example of art looting is the relief sculpting on the inside walls of the arch of Titus in Rome where the scene depicts Roman soldiers returning with treasures looted from the Temple of Jerusalem in 70 AD. The most documented examples of war-time looting in modern history was Napoléon Bonaparte’s sacking of art treasures by the imperial forces during the military campaign in Italy. The director of the Napoleon museum (later, the Louvre), Dominique-Vivant Denon was particularly interested in acquiring paintings of the Italian ‘primitive’ (pre-Raphael) schools and, setting eyes on Cimabue’s 1280 massive timber 2.76 x 4.24 meter masterpiece La Maestà (Madonna and Child), removed it from Pisa’s church of San Francesco to Paris where it is still housed in the Musée du Louvre. Triumphal military campaigns of all ages including our own, and the iron law of economics that wealth moves from the weak to the strong makes pillage and destruction of works of art inevitable in times of war. 

 

 

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