Spirited Away: Art Thieves Target Europe's Churches

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Whether it travels across borders or to the nearest big city, art stolen from churches takes the same route as art stolen from anywhere else. Relatively nondescript pieces — vases, silverware, small paintings — might be sold at a local antiques fair or online. A more impressive work will make its way up the criminal food chain, passed from the thief to his fence to a crooked dealer, who draws up a fake provenance, to a gallery owner, who turns a blind eye, and so on, until it lands on the legitimate market, eventually bought by a collector, who may have no idea it was stolen.

The money made from purloined art sometimes goes into the coffers of drug and arms dealers, even terrorists. "We have indisputable evidence that criminal networks are involved in art crime," says Vernon Rapley, head of Scotland Yard's Art and Antiques Unit. There's no way to measure accurately how much the illicit art trade — which includes stolen art, fakes, forgeries and looted artifacts — is actually worth. But some estimates run as high as $6 billion a year.

Still, what thieves gain from stealing art is outweighed by what their victims lose. Art historian Noah Charney observes, "There are very few stealable objects that have the same relationship as do artworks and the people who collect them." With religious art, that relationship is intensified, thanks to the profound spiritual connection that many worshippers have to the work. It's this connection that makes churches such easy targets in the first place. After all, churches exist to help worshippers experience their faith more fully, and one way to achieve this is by giving them intimate access to religious paintings, sculptures and ceremonial items. Unfortunately, that's the equivalent of putting all your valuables in your front yard and hoping nobody takes them.

People don't mind when museums protect their icons by placing them in glass boxes. Likewise, galleries can ask visitors to check their bags at the door, while private collectors can rig their homes with the latest alarm systems. But in a church, even the smallest security measure is a barrier between believers and the symbols of their belief. "It's a huge dilemma," says Gligoris, head of Greece's art squad. "I can't recall how many times I've urged bishops, abbots, monks and nuns to have religious treasures stored in controlled, guarded environments, and then only bring them out on religious holidays. Many won't hear of it. 'We'll feel orphaned and deprived of our faith,' they say."

Saving Beauty
Looking like a cross between a very disorganized museum and the world's most expensive rummage sale, the vault at the OCBC's Paris headquarters is filled with stolen art that the team has recovered in recent months. Items from churches — including statues, lecterns, wooden pews, and bronze busts that belong in the Père-Lachaise cemetery — are packed on shelves, stacked against the walls and spread across the floor. Alongside them are hundreds of pieces taken from museums, galleries, libraries, archaeological sites and private homes: paintings by Renoir and Courbet, sculptures by Rodin, lamps by Le Corbusier, 2,300-year-old Italian vases, centuries-old manuscripts, 19th century Cartel clocks. "We've got everything," says Captain Jean-Luc Boyer.

France's art squad is dedicated and well trained, and has access to leading experts and all the high-tech gadgetry a cop could want. Ask Boyer to show you his team's most effective weapon against art crime, and he'll sit you down in front of a computer. The Thésaurus de Recherche Electronique et d'Imagerie en Matière Artistique (Electronic Research and Image Thesaurus for Artistic Material), a.k.a TREIMA, is the OCBC's stolen-art database, one of only two national databases like it in the world. Italy has one, called Leonardo; other countries either have only city-specific databases or none at all. Containing the photos and descriptions of some 72,000 items that have been reported stolen, TREIMA enables the user to figure out quickly if an artwork under investigation is hot, and who and where it was taken from — even if that user can't tell a Monet from a Munch. When the police come across a suspicious item in a raid or gallery, say, they can search for it in the database using keywords and phrases.

But TREIMA's real trick is its ability to run visual searches, too. If the police are lucky enough to have a picture of the item, the database will use image-recognition software to look for a match. To demonstrate, Boyer clicks on a JPEG of a sculpture of three cherubs that was stolen from a church a few years ago, then drags it into TREIMA. Almost instantly, the software finds a match with another photo of the same sculpture, taken from a different angle, in different light. "It's incredible," Boyer marvels.

Nonetheless, even with equipment that could have come from an episode of CSI, Europe's art police can recover only a fraction of what goes missing. Italy's Carabinieri Tutela Patrimonio Culturale — considered the world's best art squad — employs nearly 300 officers (versus about 30 in France and six in Britain), along with a pool of informants, undercover agents and experts. It also has the largest database, holding information on 2.6 million missing artworks. Still, the carabinieri's recovery rate is only 10%, at best.

It would help if people were more camera-happy. Taking photos of artworks before they go missing makes it much easier for police to find them once they're gone. That seems obvious, but few churches take the time to point and shoot. So insurers and investigators must find other ways to keep track of religious paintings and icons. Ecclesiastical Insurance, a company based in Gloucester, England, that insures 97% of the churches in the U.K., has given free Alpha-Dot kits to all its customers. Stuck on the frame of a painting or at the base of a statue, the tiny dots are almost invisible to the naked eye and each is imprinted with a unique number linking the artwork with its church. Meanwhile, Interpol recently proposed a scheme to insert identity chips into religious works, which would allow agents to track them if they ended up with auction houses or dealers.

Of course, it's far better to prevent the art from being stolen in the first place. For churches, that means finding the delicate balance between security and sanctity. Solid locks on the doors, external lighting at night, an off-site safe to lock away valuables when the church is closed — the security measures don't have to be complicated or expensive. "You can do a lot with something as simple as a motion sensor and a length of fishing line," says art historian Charney. "Attach the sensor to the fishing line, then hang it on an object that's never supposed to move." Charney has grown so concerned about the theft of religious art that he recently formed the Association for Research into Crimes against Art, a nonprofit think tank that will provide churches with free advice on how to protect art on a limited budget.

For many, though, it's too late. Some churches have already made the painful decision to put their religious works under glass. At the Elona Monastery outside Leonidio, the Mary and Jesus icon now rests in a steel compartment with a bulletproof-glass front. A sensible measure, no doubt, but hardly a sign of faith in the goodness of human nature.