Art is beautiful . . . But the art world is full of corruption, fraud and looting.
Priceless cultural artifacts have been plundered and sold for hundreds of years. You can find these relics in museums and in private collections. In recent years, with the advent of online marketplace...Show More
Investors are pouring money into art, and a lot of it is disappearing into storage. We try to find out where the art goes, and why it goes there.
In the early morning hours of March 18, 1990, half a billion dollars worth of art was stolen from the Gardner Museum and never seen again. This is the story of America's most famous art heist.
Forgery was the dirty little secret of the Middle Ages. Levi Roach explains who counterfeited medieval manuscripts and why  Forgery was the dirty little secret of the Middle Ages. As historian Levi R...Show More
The Museum of Lost Objects traces the histories of 10 antiquities or cultural sites that have been destroyed or looted in Iraq and Syria. With hundreds of thousands of lives lost, millions of people ...Show More
“To those who served to save a little of the beauty of this world.” – epigraph, memoirs of Rose Valland Surprise! I know I said I was done with Women At War, but then I im...Show More
An escape from war-torn Germany. Lavish dinners with Hollywood royalty. A Swedish baron and a dime-store heiress: we explore the long journey of a Van Gogh still life — and what it says about the real...Show More
Knut Kreuch was a 13-year-old schoolboy in 1979 when his town in East Germany was shaken by an audacious and baffling art heist. Five very old and valuable paintings were stolen from a museum within t...Show More
Once considered “the eighth wonder of the world,” the Amber Room was a treasure of kings and architectural marvel before being stolen by Nazis and lost to history. So…what happened? It all depends on ...Show More
Art detective Arthur Brand met neo-Nazis, billionaire collectors and underground art dealers on his hunt for the two enormous bronze horse sculptures once owned by Hitler. It was all part of his quest...Show More
There are eight American turkeys painted on the walls of Schleswig's Cathedral of St Peter - which is odd... since the frescoes were created two centuries before Columbus even crossed the Atlantic.  ...Show More
We chat with one of the leading experts on art theft – professor and author Noah Charney, who unpacks the cultural fascination with this type of crime. Charney also tells us the story of one of the mo...Show More
Welcome to Empire, a brand new history podcast hosted by William Dalrymple and Anita Anand. The first series looks at the British in India: The East India Company, The Raj, Gandhi, Independence and P...Show More
Tasoula Hadjitofi uncovered a shady network looting her country's most sacred relicsIn 1974 Tasoula's country, Cyprus, was torn in two by war. Distraught and unable to return home she ended up in the ...Show More
Tasoula Hadjitofi tricked a notorious art smuggler to recover Cyprus' holiest relicsWhen war split Tasoula's home country of Cyprus in two in 1974 she had to leave home, never to return. Years later, ...Show More
For a long time, Bianca Bosker was not on speaking terms with art. “Going to galleries and museums,” she says on today’s show, “reliably made me feel like I was at least two tattoos and a master’s deg...Show More
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Turns out that the western colonial powers aren’t the only ones who loot art. Despite modern laws to prevent looting of historic objects from other countries, enforcement is weak and the trade flouri...Show More