How to Steal from the Louvre

About the Webinar

Noah Charney joins us to take a look at notable theft incidents at the world's most famous museum. The Louvre was recently the site of a theft involving of nearly 100 million dollars' worth of jewelry (or 10 million if the jewelry is chopped up, as we'll discuss), making international headlines and raising the question of just how secure such an institution is. This talk will dive deeply into that recent heist and look at what the criminals did well, where they tripped up, and what has almost certainly happened to the stolen jewelry. But that's just the start. We'll also look at other theft incidents in the history of the Louvre, focusing on the most famous peace-time robbery of anything in history, the 1911 heist of Leonardo's "Mona Lisa." Along the way, we'll learn how much of the Louvre's collection was accumulated via theft (thanks Napoleon), and hear the story of how Pablo Picasso of all people was involved in a separate Louvre heist of his own. Yale Alumni Academy thanks our co-sponsors for this program, Yale Alumni College, a program created by alumni-for-alumni which features courses, outings, and events designed to reconnect with the spirit of being at Yale. Learn more about Yale Alumni College here.

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Noah Charney
  • About the Professor

Noah Charney is the internationally best-selling author of more than 30 books, translated into fourteen languages, including The Collector of Lives: Giorgio Vasari and the Invention of Art, which was nominated for the 2017 Pulitzer Prize in Biography, and Museum of Lost Art, which was the finalist for the 2018 Digital Book World Award.

He is a professor of art history specializing in art crime, and has taught for Yale University, Brown University, American University of Rome and University of Ljubljana, as well as multimedia courses for Atlas Obscura, Yale, the Smithsonian, the National Gallery (UK) and The Teaching Company. He is founder of ARCA, the Association for Research into Crimes against Art, a ground-breaking research group (www.artcrimeresearch.org) and teaches on their annual summer-long Postgraduate Program in Art Crime and Cultural Heritage Protection. He is often described as the world's leading authority on art crime, and a New York Times Magazine feature in 2006 suggested that he had established the field of study.

He has written often for dozens of major magazines and newspapers, including The Guardian, the Washington Post, the Observer and The Art Newspaper. He is also a presenter on television and radio (including for the BBC) and is an award-winning podcast host.

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