Saint Bavo's Cathedral, Ghent

No other major artwork has been the target of as many documented crimes as the Ghent Altarpiece. Noah Charney, founder of the Association for Research into Crimes against Art, counts thirteen separate offences against it since 1432, with all or part of the work stolen outright six times.

The pattern begins early: French revolutionary troops under Napoleon seized panels in 1794 and carried them to Paris, though France returned them to Belgium after Napoleon's fall in 1815. During the First World War, occupying German forces attempted to seize the panels that remained in Ghent; a cathedral custodian discovered the plan in time, hid the panels inside the walls and floorboards of the bishop's residence, and had them smuggled to safety in the countryside before the theft could be completed.

The most notorious episode came on the morning of 11 April 1934, when the sacristan of Saint Bavo's Cathedral discovered that the panel showing the Righteous Judges, one of the altarpiece's own lower wings, had been cut from its frame overnight. Despite a ransom demand, an investigation and decades of theories, the original panel has never been recovered and the case remains formally unsolved; a faithful copy now hangs in its place. Barely a decade later, Nazi Germany seized the entire altarpiece and stored it with vast quantities of other looted European art at the Altaussee salt mine in Austria, from which the Allied Monuments, Fine Arts and Archives program recovered it, and nearly everything else the mine held, in 1945. The altarpiece's current bulletproof glass display case is a direct, standing response to that history.