PALANGA, Lithuania - A 4-kilogram (9-pound) amber, one of Europe's largest, was stolen Monday from a museum in Lithuania, according to police in the Baltic Sea coastal nation.
The piece of amber, dubbed the Stone of the Sun for its unusually bright yellow glow, was the showpiece of the Amber Museum in the resort town of Palanga, some 325 kilometers (200 miles) northwest of Vilnius, the capital. Palanga police chief Edmundas Krazauskas said several people probably took part in the robbery around 4:30 a.m. A ladder was used to reach a window on the museum's second floor, where the amber was kept in a glass case, Krazauskas said. Police declined to provide an estimate of the missing amber's value. The same piece was stolen in 1990, a year before Lithuania regained independence as the Soviet Union collapsed, though police recovered it within months. The Amber Museum — located in a 19th century manor house — has more than 20,000 jewels, stones and carvings, though police said nothing else appears to have been taken on Monday. Most of the world's amber — 40-million-year-old fossilized tree resin — is from the Baltic Sea coast. The highly prized translucent material also is known regionally as Baltic Gold. http://story.news.yahoo.com/
FIFTEENTH CENTURY TRANSFIGURATION ICON RETURNED TO RUSSIA
A very valuable monument of the ancient Russian art, the icon of the fifteenth century - The Transfiguration of Our Lord - was returned to Russia on Monday.
As the press centre of the Ministry of Culture of the Russian Federation reported, the icon of The Transfiguration of Our Lord was offered for sale by one of the New York galleries. However, as has been established by the Russian Ministry's department for the preservation of cultural values, in 1957 this icon was stolen from a church of the Moscow Old Believers' Metropolitanate and then was taken out of Russia by a Mexican diplomat as part of his collection. The department has succeeded in contacting the diplomat's widow who, having learned about the real origin of the icon, decided to return it to the old believers' community in Moscow. The icon was created at the time of the rule of Moscow Grand Prince Ivan the Third. In his epoch the walls and the towers of the Moscow Kremlin and the Assumption and the Annunciation Cathedrals were built. It was at the time of Ivan the Third that the formation of the central territory of the single Russian state was completed, and the double-headed eagle became its symbol. http://english.pravda.ru/
City to audit Art Museum on fire safety
By Alfred Lubrano Inquirer Staff Writer City Controller Jonathan Saidel said last night that his office planned to audit the Philadelphia Museum of Art to assess its fire safety and determine whether city-owned art was being properly safeguarded.
"We're going to do an investigative audit immediately," Saidel said of the museum, which is in violation of the city fire code. "The museum holds millions upon millions of dollars of city art." Museum officials would not comment last night, saying they had not received official word of Saidel's intent. "We'll reserve comment until and unless we hear from the controller's office," Anne D'Harnoncourt, the museum's director and chief executive officer, said through a spokesman. The city owns the museum building but says it is not responsible for its maintenance. Most of the art is owned by the nonprofit Philadelphia Museum of Art, which runs the museum. Saidel said the audit was spurred by an article Sunday in The Inquirer, which reported that more than half of the museum's vast basement art- storage level lacked sprinklers or other fire-suppression systems, in violation of the fire code. First cited for the violation in 1995, the museum has twice missed deadlines to bring the basement's B level up to code by installing a sprinkler system. In June, the museum requested a third chance, saying it could take 10 to 12 years, city officials said.
"I was surprised to see the severity of the noncompliance with city code," Saidel said. He added that the lengthy deadline extension the museum asked for was "unbelievable." The museum has said that its 10- to 12-year plan included plumbing and roofing work and that it would take less time to install sprinklers. Museum officials said the city misunderstood their timetable. Saidel said he planned to call in fire- safety, electrical and structural engineers to inspect the museum. The audit would be a performance audit, not a financial one. It would be one way to determine how well safety systems were functioning, and whether city assets were properly safeguarded, Saidel said. Among the city's holdings at the museum is the John G. Johnson collection of books and artwork. "God forbid someone should get hurt because of neglect," Saidel said. "Beyond the dollar amount of the art, thousands go to the museum and their lives could be in jeopardy, as well as the lives of firefighters." Officials from both the Philadelphia Fire Department and the museum stressed that the museum's basement fire-code violations did not threaten public safety.
Should a fire start in the basement, a nonpublic area, the museum's fire-detection system would alert staff, who would safely escort people out of the building in time, fire officials said. But fire officials have long complained that the nearly windowless basement - filled with flammable art and lacking an adequate fire-suppression system - would be extremely dangerous for firefighters unable to vent the cavernous place. About 30 percent of the basement has sprinklers to protect items stored for the museum shop - not art. Almost 14 percent of the space uses a gas-suppression system to put out fires, but fire officials have questioned its effectiveness. Saidel also said he planned to take an inventory of city holdings in the museum to accurately account for the artwork. Saidel added that he planned to investigate whether the fire department or the Department of Licenses and Inspections should have closed the museum years ago for failing to meet the fire code. "We close places down every day if they're not up to code," he said. "Closing the museum might have forced them into compliance." Officials from L&I and the fire department could not be reached last night. Saidel said that the city should contribute to the cost of installing an adequate fire- suppression system in the museum - estimated to be $8 million to $10 million by museum board chairman H.F. "Gerry" Lenfest.
But, Saidel added, the bulk of the cost should be borne by the museum. That is not how museum board member Julian Brodsky sees things. "Putting in a fire-protection system would be a capital expenditure and the city should be doing it, not the museum," said Brodsky, vice chairman of Comcast Corp. He would not comment on Saidel's announcement. Saidel said he could not say how long the audit might take. http://www.philly.com/
A Titian Is No Longer at Large; Its Thief Is
By SARAH LYALL
WARMINSTER, England — The package was almost comically nondescript, a brown paper parcel stowed in a cheap plastic shopping bag and stashed, as promised, at a bus stop in west London. But inside was the long-lost Titian masterpiece that investigators had been hunting for seven years.
Or was it? Tim Moore, the manager of Longleat House, the grand country estate here from which the painting had been stolen, certainly hoped so: he had just paid a reward of some $150,000 to get back the Titian, said to be worth from $7.7 million to $12.3 million. Quelling his jitters, he decided to trust the judgment of Charles Hill, an art history expert and former Scotland Yard detective, who was directing the investigation. "I'm a layman," Mr. Moore confessed. Sitting at his office in a converted stable at Longleat in this Wiltshire town, he gestured vaguely toward the yard outside. "It, frankly, could have been painted last week round the back, and I wouldn't know the difference."
The recovery of the painting — a tiny, lovely Titian called "Rest on the Flight Into Egypt," whose identity was later verified by experts — was a triumph for Mr. Hill, who has spent years on its fitful trail, an opaque labyrinth of dead ends and far-fetched tips that somehow never panned out. But in some ways, the painting's story illustrates how prosaic the business of art theft really is. Contrary to the romantic image of the suave Dr. No-like figures who display stolen caches of art in remote subterranean hideaways for their own aesthetic amusement, most art thieves are career criminals to whom art is merely a commodity in the drug and money-laundering underworld. Few seem to realize how difficult it is to convert a well- known stolen painting into cash. "Some people who organize major thefts do have a plan as to what they are going to do," said Constance Lowenthal, a consultant on art ownership and former executive director of the International Foundation for Art Research. "But many of them do not know the difference between a really high- profile masterpiece and the kind of things a fence will buy any day of the week."
"Masterpieces," she continued, "are really hard to fence."
Such seems the case with the Titian, which was bought in 1878 by the fourth Marquess of Bath, an Italian-loving aristocrat and owner of Longleat. Depicting the Virgin Mary cradling the infant Jesus as Joseph looks on, the picture now belongs to the current Lord Bath, the seventh marquess. It is notable because it is unusually small, painted on a wooden panel, and especially pretty and well-preserved. The picture was stolen on a January evening in 1995 by thieves who came by car to this 9,000-acre estate, propped a ladder on an urn and smashed an upstairs window leading into the formal drawing room. They made off with the Titian and two lesser paintings, which have not yet been recovered. That the thieves stole those other two while leaving more important works behind in the room suggests that they were amateurs, at least when it came to art appreciation. "One suspects they pinched the other two because they were small and they thought, `We're not sure what we're pinching, anyway, so we might as well pinch the whole lot,' " Mr. Moore said. What was their motive? Clearly, the thieves hoped to make a bundle. But there would have been other reasons, too.
"They do it because it's easy, because it gives them an adrenaline rush, and because it makes a statement about them that impresses them and their friends," said Mr. Hill, who now runs his own art risk consulting business and is the security adviser to the Historic Houses Association. "But you can't do anything with these paintings except lay them down somewhere and work out what to do with them. The thieves make a small amount of money in relation to the value of the picture, and then it moves around various hands in the criminal network." Lord Bath, 70, an eccentric figure known for his longish hair and bohemian habits, which include openly having a series of mistresses that he calls "wifelets" (he also has an actual wife), was home at the time, watching television. "To think they can bring a ladder to the wall, go up three floors, smash a window and get three paintings down to a car — that was alarming," he said in an interview from France, where he is on vacation. He has since spent as much as $460,000 improving security at Longleat. The police arrived in less than eight minutes, responding to the alarm set off by the broken window, but the trail was cold. The only way to recover the painting, they counseled, was to offer a hefty reward and to publicize the theft so extensively that the work would be identified as stolen as soon as it surfaced on the market. Not surprisingly, the prospect of the hefty reward attracted all manner of kooks, fabulists and con men, spinning tales of varying implausibility. "Frankly, we have had a lot of people writing from places like prison, saying, `I can get it back,' " Mr. Moore said. "I don't blame them. If I was in prison, I would do the same thing. But one does get jaundiced." Which was why nobody was overly hopeful when, after mentioning the picture and the reward in a radio interview, Mr. Hill got a phone call several months ago from a man who claimed he could get the painting back, in exchange for the cash.
After some negotiating, Mr. Hill and Mr. Moore arranged to meet the man — likely a wheeler-dealer middleman who was only vaguely connected to the thieves — last month in an office in London. He seemed to them to be remarkably cheerful and sanguine for a shadowy character. (They would not reveal who he was.) As he waited for the money to be wired to his bank account, he chatted about his favorite London pubs and about the adverse effect alcohol has on people, particularly the very rich. "He disappeared and made a few phone calls and said, `I've got it,' and I said, `Fine,' " Mr. Hill recalled. He and the man then set off for the bus stop across from the Richmond railroad station, leaving Mr. Moore behind. "So off they went, and I thought, `unless poor old Charles Hill is going to end up with a knife in his back or in a sack in the Thames, maybe we're on to something,' " Mr. Moore said. The package was at the bus stop in its bag, next to an elderly man who may or may not have been connected to the drop-off, Mr. Hill decided, although he did not ask. He ripped open a corner of the cardboard wrapping and saw Joseph's head, looking very Titian-esque. "I had spent the whole day before at the National Gallery looking at the Titians, so that I would know what to expect," he said. Mr. Hill, who used to lead the Art and Antiques Squad at New Scotland Yard and was instrumental in the 1994 return of Edvard Munch's "Scream," stolen from the National Gallery in Oslo, disclosed the details of the Titian operation to the police. But concluding that Mr. Hill's contact was not the actual thief, they expressed little interest. "Generally speaking, the police are not so much interested in the property as they are in arresting someone for the crime," Mr. Hill said. "Recovery for them is a secondary matter." Mr. Hill said he was confident that he had acted within legal bounds in negotiating with a go-between. "Dealing with him is a gray area that becomes downright murky when you think about his contacts further back," he admitted, speaking of the man's undoubted underworld connections. "But I was satisfied that I wasn't dealing with thieves, or immediate handlers or receivers of stolen goods, that would have been unethical." In addition, the still-at-large contact may have information about other stolen works whose owners are eager for their return, including Jean-Baptiste Oudry's "White Duck," stolen from the estate of Lord Cholmondeley (pronounced CHUM- ley) in 1990. Mr. Hill mentioned that picture as one he would most like to see restored to its rightful owner, along with the trove of art, including Vermeer's "Concert," stolen in 1990 from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston. Lord Bath said he was pleased to get the painting back, even though Titian is not his favorite artist and the 16th century not his favorite era. He prefers 20th-century art, he said, and has an exhibition of contemporary paintings by local West Country artists up at Longleat now, along with many large examples of his own painting. So how did he feel when he learned that the picture in the plain brown wrapper was his Titian? "I felt several million pounds richer," he said.
19 September, http://www.nytimes.com/
Dresden's flooded Semper Opera to perform "Carmen" in car plant
The Associated Press 9/18/02 3:29 PM
BERLIN (AP) -- Dresden's renowned Semper Opera, forced out of the city's 19th-century opera house by recent flooding, will perform Georges Bizet's "Carmen" in a nearby car plant. The production will be staged at a new Volkswagen luxury auto factory in the city starting Oct. 26, officials said Wednesday. The baroque opera house close to the Elbe River suffered more than $20 million in damage during the devastating flooding that swept through Germany and other central European countries last month.
The Semper Opera has already announced a special schedule of performances at alternative venues in the city as well as elsewhere in Germany and Poland. No date has been announced for events to resume in the opera house, where the basement -- which housed the stage machinery as well as the electrical, air conditioning and other technical systems -- was under water for a week. http://www.nj.com/