Art and Crime Part 2: Thieves   

These lectures will deal with theft, including the theft of the Mona Lisa from the Louvre in 1911, the theft of three paintings from the Gardner Museum in Boston, and the theft of a Caravaggio in Palermo in 1969. The course will document two large-scale looting sprees, that of the Napoleonic armies from around 1795 to 1815, and that of the Nazis, including the heroic saga of the Monuments Men (the American soldiers deployed to find and recover Nazi loot). The ongoing debate about repatriating works of art that were wrongfully seized by colonial powers will also be discussed.