Among all the accolades given to various works of art over the centuries, perhaps none is more unusual than this one: most-stolen. The long-reigning champion is Jan van Eyck’s Ghent’s Altarpiece.

The nearly 500-year old painting weighs two tons, and comprises twelve separate panels. As the first piece to demonstrate the versatility of oil painting, its importance in the history of art is unquestioned. Art Daily chronicles its history of theft and recovery:

Since its completion in 1432, [it] has been the victim of thirteen separate crimes, including seven separate thefts; it has been looted in three different wars, burned, forged, smuggled, illegally sold, hidden, hunted by Napoleon and then the Nazis, ransomed, and rescued by Austrian double-agents. (The runner-up, a portrait by Rembrandt, has been stolen only four times.)

In October 2010, Public Affairs released Stealing the Mystic Lamb: The True Story of the World’s Most Coveted Masterpiece. Written by Noah Charney, this 336-page real-life thriller unravels the truth behind each of the thefts. In the process Charney sheds light on the fascinating history of art crime.

Noah Charney is the author of the international bestselling novel The Art Thief and the founding director of The Association for Research into Crimes against Art, an international non-profit think tank. Currently professor of art history at the American University of Rome, he lives in Italy with his wife.

The following was excerpted from a New Haven, CT newspaper on March 23, ’08 after several thefts of art from local institutions. The theft was caught on camera, but the thief was long gone by the time it was discovered. This is precisely why works should be alarmed, either exclusively or with a camera as back up.

A thief allegedly slipped this painting under his jacket to feed his heroin habit — not knowing that the public library’s cameras were rolling, and his string of remarkable art heists was about to end. Police said the thief, an unidentified 53-year-old man from Farren Avenue, ripped off 39 paintings from New Haven venues, including $40,000 in art from Yale’s Slifka Center and the New Haven Free Public Library.
The paintings were recovered during a weekend bust on a Hill area home, where a second man, age 47, had been allegedly accepting the art in exchange for bags of heroin. Police expect to arrest the thief later this week.

The break in the case came from a surveillance camera at the New Haven Free Public Library, Branfuhr said. He and Assistant Chief Peter Reichard gave the following account of how they stopped a serial thief in his tracks.

New Haven police first learned of the case on March 5, when two paintings went missing from the downtown public library on Elm Street. Two days later, the thief apparently hit again: Two more paintings disappeared. Detectives reviewed the surveillance footage, which showed a man concealing something under his jacket, standing right near the spot where one of the paintings, called “Beware Of Dog” (in photo at the top of this story), had hung. Also stolen that day was this etching (pictured) by Tony Falcone of New Haven City Hall. The paintings at the library were not secured, police said. They were just hanging there.

Police constructed a description of the suspect based on the videotape. Then, just three days later, the same man came back to the library, police said. Staff called police, who took the man to police headquarters for questioning.

In a taped conversation, the alleged thief recounted how a heroin addiction drove him to steal the art, according to police. The suspect admitted to stealing five paintings from the public library, as well as three from the Joseph Slifka Center for Jewish Life at Yale. Those three paintings were done by Unabomber victim and Yale professor David Gelenter as well as his son, Daniel, a Yale music major.