20 Historic Objects That Sparked Ownership Fights

On August 21, 1911, Vincenzo Peruggia, a glazier who had worked at the Louvre, hid in the museum overnight and snuck out with Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa. Peruggia kept the painting in his Paris apartment for two years, then attempted to sell it to an Italian dealer, claiming he wanted to return it to Italy because Napoleon had stolen it. That version of events was mistaken: Leonardo had brought the painting to France himself, where it was later purchased by the French king. Peruggia was caught, and the Mona Lisa was returned to the Louvre.

Duleep Singh, the boy king of the Sikh Empire, was just ten when he lost the Koh-i-Noor diamond. When Britain’s East India Company defeated the Sikh Empire in 1849, it took over Punjab and compelled the boy king to sign away the 105-carat gem to Queen Victoria. British authorities described the transaction as a gift, but Singh signed it under military occupation and British guardianship. Later in life, Singh referred to Victoria as Mrs. Fagin, named for the fictional receiver of stolen goods in Oliver Twist.

Queen Nefertiti, painted and sculpted some 3,300 years ago, was found by German archaeologist Ludwig Borchardt at the ancient Egyptian site of Tell el-Amarna. At the time, the rules were that any find should be divided equally between Egypt and the excavating team. Egypt claims that Borchardt showed the French antiquities inspector a poorly lit photo and had the piece catalogued as a plaster princess bust, allowing Germany to take it home. Germany says it followed the rules. It remained hidden from the public for many years until it was displayed in Berlin, but Egypt has contested the bust’s ownership ever since.

A 10-foot stone giant “discovered” by workers in Cardiff, NY, was actually a hoax secretly carved by a merchant named George Hull to ridicule religious literalists. A businessman named David Hannum organized a group of people who purchased it, and after an offer from showman P.T. Barnum was rejected, Barnum made his own copy, calling it the real Cardiff Giant, and declared Hannum’s to be a fake. Hannum sued him for slander, but the court ruled both giants were hoaxes, and that Barnum couldn’t be sued for calling a fake a fake.

In the early 1800s, Thomas Bruce, seventh Earl of Elgin, Britain’s ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, removed sculptures from the Parthenon in Ottoman-controlled Athens. He said he was acting under Ottoman imperial authority, but all that remains now is a translation into Italian. The original document has been lost. Deep in debt and under fire from the poet Lord Byron, Elgin put the marbles on the market. A parliamentary committee held a public hearing about the legality of Elgin’s claim to the marbles before voting to buy them for the British Museum.

Long considered a symbol of the Holy Roman Emperor’s power, the Holy Lance, supposedly containing one of the nails used to crucify Christ, was preserved in Vienna until 1938, when Nazi Germany annexed Austria and Hitler declared that Vienna had never had legitimate rights to it. The spear and the rest of the imperial regalia were transferred to Nuremberg. It was later recovered by U.S. General George Patton’s army in a Nuremberg bunker and returned to Austria by the American military.

Orville Wright, who built the first airplane along with his brother Wilbur, pulled it out of the country for twenty years in protest over a dispute with the Smithsonian. After the Wrights’ 1903 flights at Kitty Hawk, the Smithsonian insisted that a flying machine built by one of its previous secretaries had been the first to fly, even letting an aviator tinker with and fly this plane to aid him in his patent battle against the Wright brothers. A furious Orville lent his 1903 Flyer to London’s Science Museum, where it stayed until the Smithsonian eventually issued a formal apology.

The Bayeux Tapestry is a 230-foot-long embroidered woolwork that illustrates William the Conqueror’s invasion of England in 1066. As Allied forces fought to liberate Paris in August 1944, some SS officers tried to seize the tapestry for Germany, believing it was ancient Germanic heritage. Two months earlier, Heinrich Himmler’s SS research arm had already moved the tapestry from Bayeux Cathedral to the Louvre. When the SS officers went to the museum, Jacques Jaujard, who directed France’s national museums, and his staff stalled them until French Resistance members arrived at the Louvre, securing its contents and saving the tapestry from the Germans.

It wasn’t until the Cullinan Diamond sat unsold in London for two years that Louis Botha, the prime minister of the Transvaal Colony, South Africa, stepped in to purchase the diamond, which had been discovered near Pretoria in South Africa. He would give it to King Edward VII as a peace offering following the Anglo-Boer War. Although the expense was discussed publicly and controversially by the Transvaal Parliament in those lean economic times, it passed through parliament by a solid vote.

When British troops routed the French army in Egypt, they seized the Rosetta Stone, a trilingual slab carved in Egypt some two thousand years before the French discovered it at a fort near Rashid. French scientist Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire claimed the stone belonged to the discoverer, not the crown that had defeated France. British general John Hely-Hutchinson countered that it was state property. In keeping with the terms of their surrender, the French gave the stone to Britain without damage, and it eventually ended up in the British Museum.

The British military sent a punitive expedition to Benin City, Nigeria, burning it and exiling its ruler, Oba Ovonramwen. The troops ransacked the royal palace, where they looted thousands of plaques of brass and bronze heads and carved ivory tusks. Britain’s own Admiralty then sold the artworks at auction in London to offset the expense of the campaign that transported them there, and many of the works found their way to museums in Europe and North America. The royal court of Benin protested the sales, and it’s still protesting.

The Louvre once declared that it had purchased a golden tiara, which it claimed belonged to an ancient Scythian ruler, from two Russian antiquarians. Some archaeologists immediately remarked that the artifact appeared modern, but the museum refused to admit that the artifact was fake until a goldsmith named Israel Rouchomovsky, who had made the piece without realizing it would be sold as an ancient relic, traveled to Paris, where he showed that he had manufactured the item by producing part of the decoration from memory before the museum’s specialists. The Louvre subsequently removed the piece from exhibition.

The Russian imperial court jeweler Carl Fabergé created 50 jeweled eggs for the last two Russian tsars. When the Bolshevik revolution swept away the Romanov dynasty, the Soviet government confiscated all imperial property, including Fabergé eggs. Seeking foreign exchange for its push toward industrialization, the Soviet government sold dozens of the eggs to foreign buyers in the late 1920s and early 1930s, including American businessman Armand Hammer. The exiled heirs of the Romanovs have since publicly decried the sales, saying the Soviet government had no right to sell the eggs because it never owned them.

The Portland Vase was an antique Roman cameo glass artifact that had been owned by the British Portland family for many years and had been on long-term loan to the British Museum. During a mental crisis, a man named William Lloyd smashed the vase into more than 200 fragments. These were painstakingly reassembled by a museum conservator, but the Portland family retained legal title. Many years later, the Duke of Portland sought to auction the vase to raise funds to pay his debts, but bidding fell short. It took another decade and a half before the museum finally purchased legal title to the vase.

A German scholar, Constantine von Tischendorf, took out the Codex Sinaiticus from Saint Catherine’s Monastery at Mount Sinai, giving the monks a note that said if they asked for it back, he would give it up. But he brought it to Tsar Alexander II of Russia. Following the Russian Revolution, the new Soviet government confiscated the imperial treasures. Later, when they needed hard currency, they sold the manuscript to the British Museum. The monks of the monastery protested loudly, insisting that Russia had no right to give it away since it had only ever been on loan.

These four gilt-bronze horses, originally cast during classical times, had already been stolen once by Venetians who took them from Constantinople and put them up on St. Mark’s Basilica. Napoleon Bonaparte sent them to Paris after he conquered Venice, putting them on top of a victory arch to signify his empire. After his downfall, Austria and Venice demanded them back at the Congress of Vienna, and Allied occupation authorities returned them to Venice.

Berlin’s state museums legally bought six panels of the Ghent Altarpiece, made several centuries earlier by the brothers Jan and Hubert van Eyck, after an illegal sale by a cathedral official. The Treaty of Versailles then forced Germany to hand those legally purchased panels over to Belgium as war reparations, which German art historians complained was just plunder. When Hitler’s Germany invaded Belgium, he took advantage of that history to commandeer the whole altarpiece for his planned museum. The American Monuments Men found the altarpiece in a salt mine in Austria and returned it to Belgium.

In 930 AD, during the annual Hajj pilgrimage, Abu Tahir al-Jannabi, leader of the Qarmatian state in Eastern Arabia, dispatched a force of fighters to Mecca. They plundered the city, slaughtered many pilgrims, and ripped out the sacred Black Stone from the Kaaba. Al-Jannabi then took it to his capital, considering its veneration as idolatry. The Abbasid Caliphate in Baghdad went on to spend more than twenty years attempting to negotiate with the Qarmatians, and the Abbasid caliph condemned the act. Al-Jannabi died before any deal was struck, and it was his own Qarmatian successors who eventually returned the stone in a sack, after the Abbasids paid a massive ransom in gold.

Gutenberg, inventor of the first European movable-type printing press (based in Mainz), had received two loans from a local wealthy goldsmith, Johann Fust, in order to construct the device and produce his now-famous Bible. When the work was nearly finished, Fust sued Gutenberg for repayment, and the Mainz court ordered him to pay. A legal document signed in the same year gave Fust possession of the printing presses, type, and printed Bibles, which he sold with the assistance of Gutenberg’s former employee.

When Bedouin shepherds discovered some of the Dead Sea Scrolls hidden in caves near Qumran, the Syrian Orthodox archbishop Mar Athanasius Samuel bought four major pieces, including a complete Isaiah text. He smuggled them into the United States but could not sell them to any university. He advertised them for sale in the back pages of the Wall Street Journal. Israeli archaeologist Yigael Yadin saw the advertisement while giving a lecture in New York and, because Samuel would not deal directly with Israel, used his own American lawyers to purchase the scrolls and bring them to Jerusalem.

This content was created with the help of AI.