The 25 Greatest Art Heists of All Time

In 1473, Polish pirates boarded a ship that was en route to Florence. They walked away with Hans Memling’s The Last Judgement (1467–71), an intricately rendered triptych envisioning the second coming of Christ, and hauled it back to their homeland, in what is now considered the first recorded art heist. The painting today resides at the National Museum in Gdańsk, Poland, and Italians have been seeking its recovery ever since.
The Memling heist is an example of how significantly