The Museum of Lost Art is a fascinating account of the journeys and complicated life histories of works of art that have been stolen, damaged, displaced or destroyed.
I am going to be presumptuous and assume that we have all, at some point in our lives as museum professionals, sat around with colleagues and fantasised about our dream museum and the objects we would include. For me, the thought of being able to resurrect and place objects such as Hans Holbein’s lost murals of Henry VIII or Gianlorenzo Bernini’s marble busts of Charles I back on display is just too tantalising.
It is with this passion for the displaced, the stolen, the buried and the vandalised that Noah Charney begins his book. He wants to readdress the “negative space” lost artworks have made. As he states in the opening lines: “Imagine a museum of lost art. It would contain more masterpieces than all the world’s museums combined.” For example, only a third of the roughly 15 paintings by Leonardo Da Vinci are accounted for; at least eight works are lost.
In terms of accidental damage and the destruction of art, the devastating effect that fire can have makes us even more acutely aware of objects’ vulnerability and materiality. In 1698, a fire at Whitehall Palace in London gutted most of the palatial buildings, as well as Michelangelo’s Sleeping Eros (1496), Holbein’s Portrait of Henry VIII (1536) and Bernini’s Portrait Bust of King Charles I (c.1636).
A more recent example was the fire at a Momart warehouse in east London in 2004. This was a space that was used by numerous artists and galleries, and almost all the contents of the storage facility were destroyed, including works by the contemporary artists Jake and Dinos Chapman, Chris Ofili, Damien Hirst and Tracey Emin. Art turned to ashes overnight.
There is also the case of artists destroying their own works. There are many examples of the purposeful destruction of preparatory drawings or sketches by renaissance artists, such as Michelangelo, to maintain the illusion of the notion of “sprezzatura”, or studied carelessness. This quest to keep the artist’s process as opaque as possible and to emphasise this easiness of manner led Michelangelo to feed many of his drawings to the fire.
Luckily for us, some of these lost works have been resurrected by Charney in his telling of their stories, which brings them to the fore. At times his writing veers towards the glib as he makes his points about the romantic nature of his subject, but he gives an entertaining and engrossing account of a world we don’t get to see or hear about often.
Jenny Wedgbury is a heritage learning consultant and PhD researcher at the Centre for the History of the Emotions at Queen Mary University of London
Phaidon, £19.99; ISBN 978-0-714875842
I am going to be presumptuous and assume that we have all, at some point in our lives as museum professionals, sat around with colleagues and fantasised about our dream museum and the objects we would include. For me, the thought of being able to resurrect and place objects such as Hans Holbein’s lost murals of Henry VIII or Gianlorenzo Bernini’s marble busts of Charles I back on display is just too tantalising.
It is with this passion for the displaced, the stolen, the buried and the vandalised that Noah Charney begins his book. He wants to readdress the “negative space” lost artworks have made. As he states in the opening lines: “Imagine a museum of lost art. It would contain more masterpieces than all the world’s museums combined.” For example, only a third of the roughly 15 paintings by Leonardo Da Vinci are accounted for; at least eight works are lost.
In Italy alone, there are 20,000 to 30,000 artwork thefts reported each year, with many more undocumented. This book tells the stories of how great works of art were lost, but also puts them back on display, metaphorically, and re-presents them in the pantheon of art history.
For instance, had it survived, Charney argues, Leonardo’s monumental equine sculpture Sforza Horse (1482) would be as important as the Mona Lisa, but the sculpture was never completed. An example of just one of the masterpieces that got away.
The book is split into chapters, each focusing on a different way in which works of art have been lost to us. From audacious criminal heists, looting by invading armies, iconoclasm and vandalism to human accident and mishap, every scenario is covered.
Take, for example, the case of the master thief Adam Worth, who, in 1876, orchestrated the theft of Gainsborough’s Portrait of Georgiana Duchess of Devonshire from an art dealer in London’s Bond Street – the robbery involved a first-floor window and a crowbar. The painting would not be seen again for 25 years.
The external value system we place on artworks contributes to the fact that they are desirable to criminals. In 1969, the theft of Caravaggio’s Nativity with St Francis and St Lawrence (1609) from a chapel in Palermo, Italy, went down as one of the most notorious art heists in history. It was cut down by thieves, reportedly connected to the Sicilian mafia, and its whereabouts are still unknown.
Some say the Caravaggio work was gnawed by rats and pigs in a farm outbuilding where it was hidden, while others say it is safely tucked away in an unnamed buyer’s underground vault.
In terms of accidental damage and the destruction of art, the devastating effect that fire can have makes us even more acutely aware of objects’ vulnerability and materiality. In 1698, a fire at Whitehall Palace in London gutted most of the palatial buildings, as well as Michelangelo’s Sleeping Eros (1496), Holbein’s Portrait of Henry VIII (1536) and Bernini’s Portrait Bust of King Charles I (c.1636).
A more recent example was the fire at a Momart warehouse in east London in 2004. This was a space that was used by numerous artists and galleries, and almost all the contents of the storage facility were destroyed, including works by the contemporary artists Jake and Dinos Chapman, Chris Ofili, Damien Hirst and Tracey Emin. Art turned to ashes overnight.
There is also the case of artists destroying their own works. There are many examples of the purposeful destruction of preparatory drawings or sketches by renaissance artists, such as Michelangelo, to maintain the illusion of the notion of “sprezzatura”, or studied carelessness. This quest to keep the artist’s process as opaque as possible and to emphasise this easiness of manner led Michelangelo to feed many of his drawings to the fire.
Luckily for us, some of these lost works have been resurrected by Charney in his telling of their stories, which brings them to the fore. At times his writing veers towards the glib as he makes his points about the romantic nature of his subject, but he gives an entertaining and engrossing account of a world we don’t get to see or hear about often.
Jenny Wedgbury is a heritage learning consultant and PhD researcher at the Centre for the History of the Emotions at Queen Mary University of London
Phaidon, £19.99; ISBN 978-0-714875842
