10 Greatest Paintings - Of All Time

These are the greatest paintings ever created, not because of how they look, but because of the extraordinary stories behind them. So in this video, I'm going to count down 10 of the greatest paintings ever created and the interesting stories behind them. Let's start with number 10, Girl with Balloon, Banksy. On October 5th, 2018, at a Sotheby's auction house in London, one of the most famous images in contemporary street art, Banksy's Girl with Balloon, a stencil painting of a young girl reaching for a red heart-shaped balloon drifting away in the wind, sold at auction for $1.4 million. The auctioneer's hammer fell, the room applauded, and then the painting began to move. A hidden mechanism inside the gold frame, a battery-powered shredder that Banksy had secretly installed inside the frame years earlier, before the painting was even consigned to the auction house, it activated, and the canvas began feeding through the shredder, emerging from the bottom of the frame in thin, dangling strips. The room gasped, some people screamed, and the auctioneer stood frozen. And Banksy, who wasn't present, but who was almost certainly watching remotely, posted a single image to Instagram. A photograph of the shredded painting with the caption, While the painting didn't fully shred, it stopped about halfway, leaving the top half of the image intact and the bottom half hanging from the frame in strips. Now, whether that was intentional, Banksy later suggested the shredder was supposed to destroy the entire thing but malfunctioned, or a deliberate artistic choice, leaving the piece in a state of dramatic half-destroyed tension, has never been definitively answered. What is known is that the stunt was the most audacious act of artistic sabotage in the history of the modern art market, a living artist destroying his own work at the precise moment it was sold. But this story doesn't end with the shredding. It gets better, and kind of more absurd. The half-shredded painting, now retitled Love is in the Bin, by Banksy himself, who claimed the new title the moment the painting was destroyed, wasn't returned and discarded, and it wasn't repaired. The buyer, who had just paid $1.4 million for an intact painting that was now half in pieces, decided to keep the purchase, and Sotheby's confirmed the sale. The art world erupted in a combination of outrage and admiration for this particular brand of baffled amusement that Banksy specializes in producing. But the extraordinary chapter came three years later. Love is in the Bin was re-auctioned by Sotheby's in October 2021. The sale price now? $25.4 million. The act of destruction, the shredding, the stunt, the audacity, the mechanism, and the gasps in the room had increased the painting's value by 1,800 percent. The shredded version was worth 18 times more than the intact version. Banksy had attempted to make a point about the absurdity of the art market, that art shouldn't be a commodity, that the value of paintings should not be determined by an auction house. Well, the art market's response was to agree that the system was ridiculous and then pay $25 million for the proof. It is the most expensive, I-told-you-so moment in history. 9. The Scream, Edvard Munch Edvard Munch's The Scream, the painting of that distorted, open-mouthed figure standing on a bridge against a swirling, blood-red sky with its hands pressed to the side of its head in an expression of existential terror, has become one of the most recognizable images in the history of art. It's been stolen twice, from two different museums in two different ways, and recovered both times under circumstances that range from farcical to cinematic. The first theft happened in February of 1994, on the opening day of the Winter Olympics in Lillehammer, Norway, the date the thieves apparently chose because they knew the nation's attention would be focused on the Olympic ceremonies. Two men climbed a ladder, broke a window, entered the gallery, then removed The Scream from the wall and left a note that read, thanks for the poor security. The painting was recovered three months later in a sting operation involving undercover police officers posing as art buyers, and the thieves were arrested, tried, and convicted. The second theft happened in August of 2004, not at the National Gallery this time, but at the Munch Museum, a different institution in Oslo that housed a different version of The Scream. Munch did create four versions of the composition, two paintings, a pastel, and a lithograph. Two armed men entered the museum during opening hours in broad daylight with visitors present, removed The Scream and another Munch painting from the wall, carried them out of the museum, and drove away in a waiting vehicle. The theft was brazen, public, and deeply embarrassing for the museum and for Norway. The painting was recovered about two years later, in August 2006, after a police investigation led to the arrest of several suspects. The paintings were damaged but restorable, and both will return to the museum after extensive conservation work. The painting is worth an estimated $120 million. One of the four versions sold at auction in 2012 for $119.9 million, making it one of the most expensive paintings ever sold, and its fame as an image, as a meme, as an emoji, even as a cultural shorthand for anxiety, dread, and the general feeling that the world is falling apart, ensures that it's going to remain the most targeted, most protected, and most nervously watched paintings in history. What most people don't know about it, though, is where it came from. Not the theft, but the experience that inspired it. Munch described the moment in his diary. He was walking along a path with two friends at sunset when, as he wrote, the sky turned blood red. I stopped, feeling exhausted, and leaned on a fence. It was blood and tongues of fire over the blue-black fjord in the city. My friends walked on, and I stood there trembling with anxiety, and I sensed an infinite scream passing through nature. Well, the painting is not a depiction of a person screaming. It's a depiction of a person hearing nature scream. The figure's distorted face is not producing the scream, but reacting to it. The distinction is subtle but important. The scream isn't about making noise. It's about being overwhelmed by the noise the world is already making. Munch created it in the 1890s. It became an emoji in the 2010s, and the gap between those two moments, over a century of cultural transmission that turned a Norwegian painter's private experience of existential dread into a yellow circle with a gaping mouth that people send each other when they're surprised by a text message, is one of the strangest journeys any work of art has ever taken. If you're enjoying the video, please drop a like and a comment down below. It really does help the channel out. Number 8. The Night Watch, Rembrandt. Rembrandt's The Night Watch. This is a dramatic, brilliantly late group portrait of Dutch civic militia company, painted in 1642, and it's considered one of the greatest paintings in Western art. It survived more physical attacks than almost any other masterpiece in history. This painting has been slashed with a knife twice. It's been sprayed with acid. It's been cut down with scissors, like literally cut down with entire sections of the canvas removed and lost forever. And through it all, the painting has survived, been restored, and continued to hang in a museum in Amsterdam where it occupies its own gallery. A room that was designed specifically around the painting, with the lighting, the wall color, and the viewing distance all calibrated to display it. The most traumatic alteration to The Night Watch wasn't an act of vandalism. It was an act of interior decorating. In 1715, the painting was moved from its original location to the Amsterdam town hall, where it was to be hung between two doors in a corridor. The painting was a bit too large to fit, so the solution, rather than moving the painting to a more suitable location, was to cut the painting down to size. Workers trimmed strips from all four edges of the canvas, removing big portions of the composition, including entire figures on the left-hand side. And then the trimmed sections were discarded and never recovered. The Night Watch as we see it today is smaller than the painting Rembrandt crafted, a fact that's hard to process when you stand in front of it in the museum and realize that the 12 by 14 foot painting filling the wall in front of you is the reduced version. While the knife attacks happened in 1911, when a navy cook slashed the painting, and in 1975 when an unemployed teacher attacked it with a bread knife, inflicting a series of deep cuts across the lower half of the canvas. The acid attack that happened in 1990, when a man sprayed the painting with a concentrated acid solution, a substance that was fortunately neutralized by the painting's protective varnish. Each attack required extensive restoration, and the museum responded to each incident with progressively more stringent security, with barriers, guards, surveillance cameras, and a glass enclosure. The Night Watch is a painting. It's been attacked by knives, acids, scissors, and the passage of time, and it survived all of them. It's not fragile, it's not delicate, it is, in the most literal sense, a survivor. It continues to hang on the wall exactly where Rembrandt would have wanted it, telling its story to millions of people a year, in a museum that has learned, through painful experience, that some paintings need more protection than a frame and a do-not-touch sign. Number 7. The Portrait of Adelaide Blockbauer I, Gustav Klimt. Gustav Klimt's Portrait of Adelaide Blockbauer I, a shimmering gold-leaf, Byzantine-inspired painting of a Viennese socialite, completed in 1907 and often called The Woman in Gold, is one of the most valuable paintings in the world, and subject to one of the most extraordinary legal battles in the history of art. The painting hung in the Austrian State Gallery in Vienna for over 60 years, displayed as a national treasure, reproduced on postcards and posters, and considered by the Austrian government to be the rightful property of the nation. It wasn't. The painting was originally owned by Ferdinand and Adelaide Blockbauer, a wealthy Jewish couple in Vienna whose art collection, including the Klimt portrait, was seized following the annexation of Austria in 1938. The Blockbauer family fled Austria, their property, their homes, businesses, their bank accounts, and their art was all confiscated. After the war, the Austrian government took possession of the Klimt paintings and hung them in the National Gallery, arguing that their will had bequeathed them to the Austrian state. The Blockbauer family disputed that interpretation. They argued that the paintings had been stolen, and that the will wasn't legally binding on the family's other heirs, and that Austria had no legitimate claim to the art. The case was fought for years through Austrian courts, though international arbitration, and ultimately through the United States Supreme Court, they ruled in 2004 that Maria Altmann, an elderly niece of Ferdinand Blockbauer living in Los Angeles, had the right to pursue her claim against Austria in U.S. courts. The case went to binding arbitration in Austria, and in January 2006, the arbitration panel ruled in Altmann's favor, ordering Austria to return five Klimt paintings, including the portrait of Adele Blockbauer I to the family. Maria Altmann sold the painting to Ronald Lauder for $135 million. At the time, that was the highest price ever paid for a painting, and it now hangs in a gallery in New York City, where it's been on permanent display since 2006. The story itself was adapted into a 2015 movie, Woman in Gold, starring Helen Mirren as Maria Altmann, and the painting, gold, luminous, beautiful, and carrying a story of exile, legal struggle, and eventual restitution that spans nearly 70 years, is one of the most powerful and historically significant works of art in any museum in the world. It's not just a painting, it's a reminder that art stolen during wartime doesn't become legitimate through the passage of time, and that the descendants of those from whom it was taken have the right, and in Maria Altmann's case, the persistence to take it back. 6. GUERNICA, PABLO PICASSO In April 1937, during the Spanish Civil War, German and Italian warplanes operating in support of General Francisco Franco's nationalist forces bombed the Basque town of Guernica in northern Spain. The bombing was one of the first deliberate aerial bombardments of a civilian population center in European history, and the destruction was extensive. Much of the town was reduced to rubble. The world was horrified. The Spanish Republican government, which was fighting Franco's forces, commissioned Pablo Picasso, the most famous artist in the world at the time, to create a painting for the Spanish pavilion at the 1937 Paris International Exposition. Picasso's response was Guernica, a monumental 11 by 25-foot painting in black, white, and gray that depicts the chaos, the terror, and the suffering of the bombing, in a composition that is, by universal critical consensus, one of the most powerful anti-war statements ever created. Guernica is not a realistic depiction of the bombing. It's a cubist nightmare. It's fractured, distorted, and deliberately disorienting, in which human figures, animals, and architectural fragments are broken apart, reassembled, and presented in a visual language that communicates not what the bombing looked like, but what it felt like. A screaming horse, a dismembered soldier, a woman holding a lifeless child, a bull standing amid the wreckage, a light bulb blazing above the scene like a mocking, inadequate substitute for the sun. The painting is enormous, and it's overwhelming, and it's really deliberately difficult to look at, which is exactly Picasso's point. War is difficult to look at, and a painting should be too. The most famous story about Guernica involves an exchange that may or may not have actually occurred, but that's become part of the painting's mythology. According to the legend, a German officer visited Picasso's studio in occupied Paris during the Second World War, saw a photograph of Guernica, and asked Picasso, did you do this? Picasso replied, no, you did. Whether the exchange is historically accurate or apocryphal, it captures the essence of what Guernica represents, an artist's response to violence. Guernica now hangs in a museum in Madrid, returned to Spain in 1981 after spending decades in the custody of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, in accordance with Picasso's explicit wish that the painting not be returned to Spain until democracy was restored to the country. Franco ruled Spain as a dictator from 1939 until 1975, and Picasso, who spent his entire career in exile from Franco's Spain, stipulated that Guernica should remain outside the country until a legitimate democratic government was established. The painting is displayed behind glass not because of concerns about aging or environmental damage, but because of concerns about an attack. In 1974, while Guernica was still on display at MoMA in New York, a man spray-painted the words, kill lies all, across the painting in red paint. It was an act of vandalism that was removed by conservators without permanent damage to the surface, but it showed the vulnerability of a painting that is, because of its political content and its emotion, a target not just for thieves, but for anyone who wants to make a statement by defacing one. Visitors who stand before Guernica, 11 feet tall, 25 feet wide, filling an entire wall in shades of black, white, and gray, make every other painting in the museum look like it's trying too hard. Visitors will experience the same reaction that viewers have experienced since 1937, silence, maybe discomfort, and the recognition that a painting can say more about the consequences of violence than any photograph and any news report or speech ever delivered. 5. The Last Supper, Leonardo da Vinci Leonardo da Vinci's The Last Supper, the monumental mural depicting Christ and his 12 disciples at the moment Christ announces that one of them will betray him, is one of the most famous paintings in the world, and it's one of the most studied. This painting has been deteriorating since the moment Leonardo finished it, and the story of its survival through chemical decay, military occupation, bombing, flooding, and centuries of well-intentioned, but sometimes disastrous restoration attempts, is one of the most dramatic stories in the history of art. The problem began with Leonardo himself. Rather than using the traditional fresco technique, in which pigments are applied to wet plaster and bond chemically with the wall as the plaster dries, creating a durable, long-lasting surface, Leonardo chose an experimental technique that involved applying tempera and oil paint to a dry plaster wall, sealed with a ground layer of his own invention. This technique gave Leonardo the time and flexibility he wanted. Fresco does require fast, confident work before the plaster dries, while Leonardo's methods allowed him to work slowly and revise. The technique began failing almost immediately. Within 20 years of the painting's completion in 1498, it was flaking, peeling, and separating from the wall. The dampness of the refectory accelerated its deterioration, and by the mid-16th century, contemporary observers were already noting that the painting was in poor condition. What followed was five centuries of damage, neglect, and rescue. In the 17th century, the monks of a convent cut a doorway through the lower center of the painting, removing Christ's feet from the composition permanently. In the late 18th century, troops used the refectory as a stable and an armory, and soldiers reportedly threw stones and food at the painting. In 1796, Napoleon's troops occupied the convent, and while Napoleon himself reportedly ordered the room to be protected, the damage from military occupation continued. Then in August 1943, an Allied bombing raid struck the convent, destroying the roof and three walls of the refectory, but the wall bearing The Last Supper, which had been protected by sandbags and a steel framework, survived. The painting was exposed to the elements for several months before a temporary roof was erected, and the damage from humidity, rain, and temperature fluctuations during this period added another layer of deterioration. This painting has undergone at least six major restoration campaigns over the centuries, each one attempting to stabilize the surface and remove accumulated dirt. The most recent, a painstaking 21-year project completed in 1999, removed centuries of overpainting, varnish, and accumulated grime to reveal as much of Leonardo's original work as still existed beneath the layers. The result is a painting that is haunting and fragile. It's a shadow of what Leonardo created, reduced by chemistry and time, and by the irony that the experimental technique Leonardo chose to use, because it gave him more freedom, is the same technique that's been destroying his greatest mural since the day he finished it. Visitors have to book timed tickets weeks in advance, and you're only allowed in 15 minutes at a time. Groups are limited to 25 people. The climate control system will maintain a precise temperature and humidity level. The Last Supper is a masterpiece that has spent 500 years trying to disappear, and it's been held in existence against its own chemistry by the efforts of conservators, engineers, and soldiers and monks who refuse to let it vanish. It's the most famous painting that almost was not. 4. The Salvatore Mundi – Leonardo da Vinci In November of 2017, a small, damaged, heavily restored painting of Christ holding a crystal orb, attributed after years of debate to Leonardo da Vinci, sold at a Christie's auction house in New York for $450 million. It was the highest price paid ever for any artwork at any auction. The was identified after months of investigation as Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia, acting through an intermediary. And then, the painting disappeared. The Salvatore Mundi has not been publicly displayed since its sale. Its location is unknown, or at least not publicly confirmed. It was later reported to be in storage in Switzerland, and it was rumored to be destined for a new museum in Saudi Arabia. But no confirmation has come from the Saudi government, no museum has announced the painting's exhibition, and no journalist or art expert has been granted access to see it since it sold. The most expensive artwork in history is, for all practical purposes, missing. But the controversy doesn't end with this disappearance. The attribution of the Salvatore Mundi to Leonardo da Vinci is itself disputed, and the dispute cuts to the heart of what a $450 million painting actually is. Some scholars accept the attribution, arguing that the painting's composition, its techniques, and its provenance are consistent with Leonardo's other known works. Others, including several prominent Leonardo experts, argue that the painting is largely the work of his workshop assistants, with only limited involvement from the master himself, and that the extensive restoration the painting underwent before its sale makes it impossible to determine with any certainty how much of the visible surface is The Salvatore Mundi is the most expensive painting in the world. It may or may not be by Leonardo da Vinci, it may or may not be on a superyacht, it may or may not be in a warehouse in Geneva, and nobody outside a very small circle of Saudi officials knows where it is, what condition it's in, or when, if ever, the public will see it again. The painting's journey before the 2017 sale is extraordinary. It's documented in the collection of King Charles I of England in the 17th century, then it passed through various owners over the following centuries, gradually losing its attribution to Leonardo as it's deteriorated and overpainted by successive restores. By the 20th century, it was considered a copy, a workshop piece, not an original. It was sold at a New Orleans estate auction in 2005 for $10,000 to a consortium of art dealers who suspected it might be something more. They were right, or at least they convinced enough experts that they were right. After extensive restoration, the painting was authenticated as a Leonardo da Vinci. A panel of specialists convened by the National Gallery in London displayed the painting in its landmark 2011 Leonardo exhibition, and the attribution catapulted the painting from a $10,000 curiosity to the most expensive artwork in the world in just 12 years. The Salvatore Mundi is the art world's greatest mystery of the 21st century. It's a $450 million question mark hanging in a location that nobody can confirm, attributed to an artist that not everyone agrees painted it, and owned by a man who hasn't said a single public word about it since the hammer fell. 3. The Mona Lisa The Mona Lisa is the most famous painting in the world. I mean, come on, let's be honest. 30,000 people visit it every day at the Louvre in Paris. It hangs behind bulletproof glass and It is, by every measure, the most recognizable work of art in human history. It wasn't always. For most of its existence, from its completion to around 1517 to the early 20th century, the Mona Lisa was respected by art historians and admired by painters, but it wasn't famous in the way it is today. It was, by the standards of the Louvre's collection, a small, dark, somewhat mysterious painting that hung among many other paintings, and most people walked past without stopping. What changed everything was a theft. On August 21st, 1911, a handyman named Vincenzo Perugia, an Italian who had worked at the Louvre and who was familiar with the building's layout and its security, hid in the museum overnight, removed the Mona Lisa from the wall the following morning, a Monday when the museum was closed, concealed it under his coat, and walked out through a side entrance. This theft was an international sensation, the biggest art crime in history at the time, and a media event that would transform the painting's status. The empty space sat on the Louvre's walls, with just four hooks, a bare rectangle of lighter-colored wallpaper where the painting had hung, and became the most visited spot in the museum. Crowds came to see where the Mona Lisa had been, not where it was, but where it wasn't. Newspapers around the world covered the story for weeks, then it was months, and the painting's image was reproduced in every newspaper on every front page in every country, and for the first time in history, the Mona Lisa became a household image. Needless to say, the investigation was enormous. The French police interviewed thousands of people, they searched hundreds of locations, and at one point questioned Pablo Picasso as a suspect. He was eventually cleared. The mystery consumed France, and it fascinated the world for over two years, during which time the Mona Lisa's image appeared on posters, postcards, and advertisements, with a frequency that ensured the painting was permanently imprinted on the global consciousness. Perugia was caught in December of 1913 when he attempted to sell the painting to an art dealer in Florence, claiming he had stolen it as an act of patriotism to return an Italian masterpiece to Italian soil. He contacted Alfredo Gheri, a Florentine art dealer, and offered him to sell the Mona Lisa. Gheri, barely believing what he was hearing, agreed to meet and brought along the director of the Uffuzi Gallery. Perugia showed them the painting, the actual Mona Lisa, stored in a trunk with a false bottom in his hotel room. They confirmed its authenticity, and then they called the police. Perugia was arrested, tried, and sentenced to a relatively brief prison term. The Italian public largely regarded him as a folk hero rather than a criminal. The painting that Vincenzo Perugia had hid under his bed, a painting that was, before the theft, one of many Louvre masterpieces, returned as THE Louvre masterpiece, a single, irreplaceable centerpiece of the most-visited museum in the world. All because a guy decided to steal it, the newspapers decided to cover it, and the world decided, collectively, that the painting that had been stolen was the painting that mattered most. 2. The Ghent Altarpiece The Ghent Altarpiece is also known as the Adoration of the Mystic Lamb. It is the most stolen artwork in the history of the world. Completed by Flemish painter Jan van Eyck in 1432 and installed in St. Bavo's Cathedral in Ghent, Belgium, this enormous polyptych, which is a multi-paneled altarpiece measuring about 14.5 by 11.5 feet and weighing over two tons, has been the target of 13 different crimes over its 600-year history. Its criminal history reads like a thriller that no novelist would dare to write because it would seem too implausible. In 1566, Calvinist iconoclasts attempted to seize and burn it during a wave of religious violence. The painting was hidden by cathedral guards just in time. In 1794, Napoleon's invading troops stole four panels and shipped them to the Louvre in Paris. They were returned after Napoleon's defeat at Waterloo. In 1816, a vicar at the cathedral reportedly sold the wings panel to an art dealer. They ended up in a Berlin museum and were returned to Belgium as a condition of the Treaty of Versailles in 1919. And then in 1934, the most enduring mystery began. On the night of April 10th, a thief broke into St. Bavo's Cathedral and stole two panels from the lower register of the altarpiece, the panel of the Just Judges, which depicts a group of horsemen, and the panel of St. John the Baptist. The St. John panel was recovered shortly afterwards, left in a suitcase at the Ghent train station, along with a ransom note demanding a million Belgian francs. The Just Judges panel wasn't returned. Over the following months, the thief, communicating through a series of 12 ransom letters to the Bishop of Ghent, attempted to negotiate the return of the panel. The Belgian government refused to pay, and the correspondence continued for months, cryptic, teasing, and increasingly desperate. Then in November of 1934, a stockbroker collapsed at a political rally and was rushed to the hospital. On what proved to be his final day, he directed his lawyer to a desk in his home, where copies of all 12 ransom letters were found, plus a 13th letter, never sent, that contained the only clue to the panel's location. It rests in a place where neither I nor anybody else can take it away without arousing the attention of the public. The panel has never been found, the Ghent police still maintain an officer assigned to the case, and the cathedral still receives tips every year. Treasure hunters, former police officers, and conspiracy theorists have spent decades searching, in churches, in walls, in basements, and in crypts, and in every location that matches the cryptic description. The altarpiece's ordeal didn't end with the 1934 theft. During the Second World War, the painting was hidden by the Belgian government to prevent it from falling into German hands, but it was intercepted. The altarpiece was seized and transported to Neuschwanstein Castle in Germany, and then to a salt mine in Austria, where it was stored alongside thousands of others looted artworks. The Monuments Men, the Allied unit tasked with rescuing this looted art, reached the salt mine before the destruction could be carried out, and the Ghent altarpiece was recovered, returned to Belgium in 1945, and reinstalled in the cathedral, where it's remained ever since. The Ghent altarpiece has survived Calvinists, Napoleon, art dealers, and ransom demands, even the Second World War, and a salt mine. It's been stolen by soldiers, clerics, and stockholders. It's been hidden, ransomed, looted, and rescued. And one of its 12 panels, the Just Judges, a painting of horsemen riding toward a heavenly vision, have been missing for over 90 years, resting somewhere that nobody's been able to find. The most stolen artwork in history of the world still, as of today, is incomplete. 1. Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum Heist In the early morning hours of March 18th, 1990, St. Patrick's Day night in Boston, two men dressed as police officers knocked on the side entrance of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, a small palazzo-style art museum in the Fenway neighborhood. They told the security guard on duty that they were responding to a disturbance, the guard, violating museum protocol, which prohibited opening the door to anyone after hours, buzzed them in. The men told the guard to step away from the desk, then they told him they had a warrant for his arrest. Then they handcuffed him, wrapped his head in hands and duct tape, and handcuffed his colleague in the basement. Then they spent the next 81 minutes walking through the museum, selecting works of art, removing them from their frames, and carrying them out to a waiting car. They took 13 works of art, three Rembrandts, including The Storm on the Sea of Galilee, his only known seascape, a Vermeer, The Concert, now considered the most valuable stolen painting in the world, estimated at over $250 million, a Manet, five Degas drawings, a Chinese bronze beaker, a Napoleonic finial from the top of a flagpole, and a flink. The total value of the stolen art has been estimated from anywhere between $500 to $600 million, making the Gardner Heist the largest property theft in the history of the world. The thieves were never identified and the art was never recovered. The FBI has named suspects, members of organized crime in the Boston area, but no arrests have been made. The museum has offered a $10 million reward for information leading to the return of the artworks, the largest reward ever offered for stolen property. But what makes this heist unique, beyond the audacity of it, is what the museum did with the empty frames. They left them on the walls. Every frame from which a painting was stolen on March 18th, 1990 still hangs in its original position. The frames aren't placeholders either, they're not awaiting replacement works, they're the memorials, physical, visible, and daily reminders of what was taken. The wall where Rembrandt's Storm on the Sea of Galilee hung is empty too, the frames are there, the nails are there too, and the wallpaper behind the frames is slightly faded, and the paintings are just not there. The FBI has investigated the case continuously since 1990. They have named persons of interest, primarily connected to organized crime, and in 2013 the FBI announced that they had believed they identified the two men who committed the theft, both members of a criminal organization active in New England in the early 90s. But knowing who did it isn't the same as knowing where the paintings are, and the FBI acknowledged that the trail from the thieves to the artwork has gone cold. The Gardner Heist is the greatest unsolved art crime in history. It's a $500 million theft committed by two men in police uniforms on St. Patrick's Day night, in a city where nobody saw anything and nobody said anything. Somewhere, in a warehouse, in a basement maybe, in a private collection, or in a location nobody's thought to search, 13 works of art, including a Vermeer that's worth more than most museums entire collections, are waiting to be found.