Word: vermeer
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...Lewis and Clark's trek across North America. The National Gallery had determined that it needed only six crates to hold the most important items. The first scheduled to be rescued: Leonardo da Vinci's Ginevra de' Benci. Other works include paintings by Jan Vermeer, a postcard-size depiction of St. George and the Dragon by Rogier van der Weyden, and Raphael's Alba Madonna. Initially, plans called for the paintings to be taken to Mount Weather and hung on the walls there, arranged not by artist or period but by the size of the canvas. Curators were worried, however...
...March 18, 1990, two thieves disguised as policemen entered Boston's Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, trussed up two guards and made off with a king's ransom: three Rembrandts, five paintings by Degas, one Manet and one of only 36 known Vermeers in existence. The Vermeer canvas was hacked from its stretcher, leaving chips of paint on the floor. At an estimated total value of $200 million, it may have been the most lucrative art theft in history...
...point is not idle, and many scholars would rush to defend it. Still, when an Etruscan tomb is emptied, a church desecrated, a Mayan temple bulldozed and a museum Vermeer yanked from its frame, it is hard to see how rich societies, let alone poor ones, can enjoy art in peace for long. In turning a blind eye to the canker that feeds on it, the art world is losing security, losing art and losing its soul...
...thieves made off with 11 paintings and prints by such artists as Rembrandt, Vermeer, Manet and Degas, and swiped an ancient Chinese vase and a gilded eagle from the flag pole of a Napoleonic flag...
...leading to the return of the paintings. This ransom money -- "reward" is a euphemism -- may work, if it does not gum up the investigation with half the flakes and crazies from Boston to Miami. But it does not dispose of the ghastly possibility that one of the greatest of Vermeer's paintings (along with other things of lesser significance) may be destroyed by the thieves as too hot to handle...