The first time I seriously wanted to steal a work of art was not the same moment that I realised I actually could.
The original desire came on fast: a small and exquisite painting of the Madonna and child glowed just a hand stretch away from me, a luscious pea green panel behind Mary as she regarded her infant with … wonder? Suspicion? The image vibrated with feeling. I felt like I had to live with that picture for the rest of my life.
But I was standing in the crowded rooms of Venice’s Accademia and mad lust gave way to visions of Italian jails, and with a backward glance that I hoped she understood, I moved on.
The day I realised I could actually pick up something of extraordinary value and just put it in my pocket and walk away was very different. I was in the jumble sale that was the original Museum of Cairo and like the dusty shops of those mean old hoarders of my childhood who collected everything but would part with nothing, artefacts were piled as high as the ceiling — seemingly uncatalogued, unnamed and unprotected.
You brushed past countless sarcophagi, bowls, plates, figurines, vessels, and hieroglyphic panels, all carelessly stacked as if this were the Cash Converters of the ancient tomb raiders. Is this where all that stuff taken from the chambers of the kings thousands of years ago ended up?
I was horrified and just a little excited: would anyone really notice if that tiny figure of Anubis went missing? It didn’t even seem to have an accession number! And I would care for it so well, not like this flea market!
By now, my husband had learned to read my face when this terrible desire would steal over me and he firmly took my hand and guarded me around the rest of the exhibition.
A time for accountability
I’ve never forgotten the chaos of that museum. All Egyptian artefacts tell a story of theft — taken from what was supposed to be the burial chamber and eternal glory of their inhabitant — but these precious items have always been the focus of the greedy and the poor. Stuff to be stolen, as my colleague Marc Fennell has brilliantly explored.
And those tombs have been raided from the moment the burial party sealed the entry. So, what has been the difference between the ancient grave robbers and tomb raiders of ancient Egypt and, say, Lord Carnavon, the controversial discoverer of the tomb of Tutankhamun? Not much really except for one, crucial detail: at least we knew where the stuff he stole went.
The long-standing international argument around the return of ancient treasures by colonial powers has gained complexity and political heft as countries of origin establish credible curatorial institutions and post-colonial accountability is taken.
The already weak arguments for the retention of things like the Parthenon Marbles — hacked from the temple by Britain’s ambassador to Constantinople Lord Elgin — or many Egyptian treasures grow increasingly flimsy. Even the Vatican has now returned their loot to Greece.
Whether by accident or design, King Charles — a keen student of and advocate for culture and heritage, stolen or not — has seemingly flown a flag for the return of the Parthenon Marbles by wearing a Greek flag tie and pocket handkerchief to COP28 after UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak cancelled a meeting with the Greek leader Kyriakos Mitsotakis at the last minute on Monday because he wanted to talk about the return of the treasures — something the UK prime minister is firmly against.
Was this a sartorial, Madeleine Albright-level bit of diplomatic signalling? We’ll probably never know, but even Sunak would surely realise, after only the briefest tour of the soaring and beautiful Acropolis Museum in Athens, which was built to house and celebrate the glories of the Parthenon, that its original decorations need to go home.
Thieves or conservators?
You could make the argument — deeply unpopular and possibly self-cancelling though it might be — that in retrospect some of the colonial looters and their buyers did the world a favour by keeping these works locked in their institutions.
Did the British Museum, New York’s Metropolitan Museum and the private collections of countless wealthy Victorians turn out to be the safest place for these artefacts, looted from countries that would go through civil wars, Nazi occupation, modern foreign bombardment, and deliberate political destruction?
Maybe. A pre-Syrian civil war visit that I made to the remains of the glorious Roman city of Palmyra, subsequently destroyed by IS, made me wish some superpower had been able to cart those ruins away to safety.
But while you could make the case that turns some, some, of these Victorian-era thieves into early-adopter conservators, it only flies if you now give the work back.
The absence of the missing Parthenon Marbles in that extraordinary Acropolis Museum, with its pediment built to match the exact height of the Parthenon just outside the window, remains a patronising sneer at a country well equipped to look after its own.
Even that strange, pink stucco museum in Cairo in which I almost became an international art thief has had a rebuild and is now better able to conserve treasures that glint as if they were made yesterday.
It’s the only thing that can really stop thieves like me and British monarchs and Victorian aristocrats: strong walls, curatorial excellence and bulletproof glass.
This weekend you can read a little more about royal semaphore, as well as more things about AI we should have guessed and the pleasures of Christmas day alone — I’ve done it and I highly recommend it.
Have a safe and happy weekend and in further celebration of jealously hoarding treasures, here’s a magnificent song written by Bjork sometime in the late ’90s that she shelved and only recently unearthed, reworked and released.
It’s like reaching back into her past and yours just by hearing it. The video is, of course, marvellous, too. I hope you love it. Go well.