The Rescue Artist (40 page)

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Almost everything written in Shakespeare’s hand has been lost, with the exception of six signatures (each spelled differently). With Shakespeare out of the running, the record price for a handwritten document currently stands at $30.8 million, paid by Bill Gates in 1994 for a seventy-two-page manuscript by Leonardo da Vinci. The so-called Codex Leicester is a collection of scientific observations studded with drawings that probe such mysteries as the brightness of the moon and the meandering of rivers.

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Trench police estimated Breitwieser’s haul at between $1.4 billion and $1.9 billion. Jonathan Sazonoff, a television producer and expert on art crime, suggests that a more accurate guess might be in the neighborhood of $150 million.

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Despite persistent rumors to the contrary, scholars say that the authenticity of the Louvre’s
Mona Lisa
is beyond question. The painting had been studied, photographed, and documented minutely before the theft, and a host of before-and-after comparisons—such as an examination of the tiny cracks in the varnish that covers the painting’s surface—establish its identity beyond a doubt.

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It should perhaps be stated explicitly that the amount of art stolen by modern-day gangsters is dwarfed by the amount stolen by the Nazis, gangsters backed by the full might of the state. All armies have looted, but the Nazis made the process organized and efficient. In France alone, according to Hector Feliciano’s
The Lost Museum: The Nazi Conspiracy to Steal the World’s Greatest Works of Art
, the Nazis seized one-third of all art in private hands. The best account of the Nazi assault on art is Lynn Nicholas’s
Rape of Europa
.

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The British journalist Peter Watson wrote
The Caravaggio Conspiracy
about the case, in 1984. Watson believes that the painting survived its theft only to be destroyed in an earthquake in 1980.