Displaying items by tag: looted

A marble bust of the Roman goddess Diana that was looted by the Nazis has returned to Poland after 75 years.

The 18th-Century statue was taken in 1940, but its whereabouts remained unknown until it emerged in a Vienna auction house earlier this year.

A group of ancient frescoed stone slabs have gone on display in Italy for the first time since they were looted by an infamous antiquities trafficker known as “The Captain."

According to Reuters, the artworks, dating from 400 BC, were illegally excavated from the ancient Greek site of Paestum, located near Naples.

The heirs of a Jewish Cabaret performer who was murdered by the Nazis in 1941 persuaded a Manhattan judge Tuesday to block the sale and transport of two Egon Schiele paintings that were part of his extensive collection.

Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Charles Ramos ordered London-based art dealer Richard Nagy and the Conservancy that runs the Park Avenue Armory's annual art show to freeze the disposal of the watercolors — worth an estimated $5 million — until he can hold a hearing December 1.

A painting by Pieter Bruegel the Elder, The Fight Between Carnival and Lent (1559), is at the center of a dispute between Austria and Poland after claims arose that the artwork might be Nazi loot.

According to the Financial Times, documents that have surfaced in Krakow's National Museum claim that the Renaissance masterpiece, whose value is estimated at $77 million, was seized by Charlotte von Wächter, the wife of Krakow's Nazi governor Otto von Wächter, during the German occupation of Poland.

Two decades after stealing antiquities from a first-century Jewish city in the Golan Heights, on the borders of Israel and Syria, a robber returned the loot to a museum's courtyard, Israeli authorities announced.

The returned artifacts included two 2,000-year-old sling stones, also called ballista balls, which would've been used as weapons, and an anonymous typed noted saying, "These are two Roman ballista balls from Gamla, from a residential quarter at the foot of the summit.

The Whatsapp message appeared on his iPhone: photos of an ancient Mesopotamian vase worth $250,000, part of a highly-valued set that is waiting to be extracted.

The recipient, Amr Al Azm, replied that he was interested. How to proceed? A message from a different account followed. The vase could be smuggled through Lebanon.

Al Azm, an anthropology professor in Ohio, was faking it, as he does when photos of looted antiquities are sent to him in the belief that he is a collector or dealer. He is a detective - - self-appointed -- hoping to save some of mankind’s rarest and most vulnerable artifacts by tracking the burgeoning antiquities trade of Islamic State in Iraq and Syria.

At first glance the 25 artifacts displayed in the courtyard of a former convent just off the Tiber River here on Tuesday seemed to have little in common: three first-century B.C. fresco fragments from Pompeii were exhibited alongside fifth- and sixth-century B.C. Etruscan and Attic vases, a 17th-century Venetian cannon, a 12th-century mural fragment depicting Christ and three rare 17th-century books. What they shared was a nefarious past.

Three years after German authorities uncovered a vast collection of one of Adolf Hitler’s main art dealers, the first artwork restituted from the trove will head to auction next month.

On June 24, Sotheby’s in London will ask between $540,000 and $850,000 for Max Liebermann’s “Two Riders on a Beach,” a 1901 scene of two elegantly dressed men riding chestnut-colored horses beside a surf.

A court handling the late art collector Cornelius Gurlitt's inheritance says it has formally authorized the return of the first two paintings from his trove to their rightful owners' descendants.

The Munich district court said Tuesday it approved the handover of Henri Matisse's "Woman Sitting in an Armchair" and Max Liebermann's "Two Riders on the Beach" after both potential heirs to Gurlitt's collection endorsed the move.

Five paintings missing since World War II are being returned to collections in Germany at the behest of the heirs of their American acquirers.

The paintings, including three won by an American GI in a poker game, were turned over to the German government on Tuesday. Their return was organized by the State Department and the Monuments Men Foundation, which promotes the work of those who protected cultural works during the war and seeks to track down and repatriate objects that went missing.