Australia: Art's a steal at Christmas time

From Adelaide Now: Art's a steal at Christmas time
INSTEAD of considering what they've got for Christmas, some art collectors discover just what they've lost.

Christmas has proved an excellent season for great art thefts over the years, prompting the Art Loss Register to put together a list of treasures stolen while everyone was celebrating Christmas. The register is an international agency that tracks down missing artworks.

On Christmas Eve 1985, in Mexico City's National Museum of Anthropology, 140 Mayan and Aztec objects were stolen. That was when the museum discovered its alarm system had not been working for three years. About $40 million of gold and objects are still missing.

On New Year's Eve 1999, a thief cut a hole in the roof of the Ashmolean museum in Oxford, England, and climbed down a rope ladder, timing his break-in with celebratory fireworks for the new millennium to drown out any sounds. The thief made off with a $5 million painting by Paul Cezanne entitled View of Auvers-sur-Oise.

In 2002, Christmas thieves at Amsterdam's Van Gogh Museum stole a pair of his paintings after entering through the roof. They set off the alarm system but were gone by the time police arrived. The paintings have never been recovered.

Thieves in La Paz, Bolivia, decided to strip more than 100 religious artefacts from the Church of San Andres De Machaca on Christmas Eve. Art Loss Register has recovered two of the most valuable paintings.

Lord Elgin at Christmas 1798 set in motion a plan to record the Parthenon Marbles by taking plaster casts of them. When he discovered originals that fell off the Parthenon were being used for lime burning, he decided he would take the originals instead. The Elgin Marbles ended up in the British Museum, and the Greek Government is still arguing for their return.

The Art Loss Register says notable examples of stolen Christmas-themed artworks include Caravaggio's Nativity from a Palermo church in 1969. The painting, by one of Italy's greatest old masters, is valued in the tens of millions of dollars and never has been found. It is believed to be in the hands of the Mafia, although one informer says it was eaten by rats and pigs while hidden on a farm.