Literally thousands of works of art have been lost to fire, earthquakes, theft, vandalism, war, or the ravages of time, while for others, what we see of them today might as well be a completely different work to the one the artist(s) originally produced.
- The Last Supper:
- While the painting has survived environmental damage, target practice from Napoleonic soldiers, and a World War II bombing run, most of the original paint Leonardo used has been lost and parts of the painting are obfuscated or damaged. Several restoration efforts have been made to combat the portrait's decay (most notably an extensive restoration from 1978-98), but these efforts have been accused of replacing the original painting with an imitation.note
- The bottom part of the portrait, which notably shows Jesus's feet, was so damaged that it was removed in favor of putting another door in the chapel, preventing any type of restoration for that part of the portrait.
- Raphael Sanzio's Portrait Of A Young Man is probably the most high-profile painting to still be missing after World War II; it was stolen by the Gestapo on behalf of Hans Frank from the collection of the Czartoryski Museum in Kraków, along with Leonardo da Vinci's Lady With An Ermine and a painting by Rembrandt. Though the other two works were recovered after the war, Portrait of a Young Man remains lost, though the Polish government claims that Raphael's painting survived the war.
- Possibly the single most notorious missing artwork of any kind after the war is the legendary "Amber Room" from the Catherine Palace near St. Petersburg in Russia. The complete set of amber, gold, and glass wall panels was looted by the Nazis and taken to Königsberg (now Kaliningrad), but disappeared after the Germans fled the city. It is possible that it was destroyed in Soviet air bombings and/or the final military assault,note but there are rumours to this day that it survives somewhere in Russian government possession, or that it was taken by the Germans despite what the records claim. Most historians now believe that it was destroyed, and that the Soviet government never admitted it because of the embarassment of one of the country's most iconic artworks being destroyed by its own military actions. A replica was constructed in the palace between 1979 and 2003.
- On 18 March 1990, thieves stole thirteen works from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston; to this day, none of them have been recovered, and as many of them must be stored in temperature, humidity, and acidity controlled conditions, it seems unlikely that they have survived in anything resembling presentability. The most valuable of the lost works is Vermeer's The Concert, worth over $200 million and one of just 34 known Vermeer works at the time of its disappearance; others include three paintings by Rembrandt (chiefly The Storm On The Sea Of Galilee, his only known seascape), five paintings by Edgar Degas, one painting each by Govert Flinck and Édouard Manet, an ancient Chinese gu, and a 19th-century bronze eagle finial.
- Between 1900 and 1907, Gustav Klimt created three paintings for the University of Vienna, entitled Philosophy, Medicine, and Jurisprudence (to be displayed in the faculties of those subjects); the university denounced the paintings as "perverted excess", and they ended up in private collections instead. All three paintings were seized by the Nazis and, after public exhibitions, they wound up in Schloss Immendorf in 1943. When the Nazis retreated from Austria in 1945, the castle was set alight, and Klimt's paintings were lost in the fire; Medicine is the only one of the three for which a colour photograph survives, while only black and white photos exist of the other two.
- The six paintings that made up William Hogarth's first satirical series, 1731's A Harlot's Progress, were destroyed in a fire in 1755. The plates from which engravings were cast in 1732 survived, and the engravings are the only way to view the pictures today.
- The polyptych altarpiece at St. Bavo's Cathedral in Ghent, designed and painted by brothers Hubert And Jan Van Eyck from c.1420-32, is one of the masterpieces of the early Flemish school.note However, two of the panels, Saint John the Baptist (central triptych, right panel) and The Just Judges (lower left panel), were stolen in 1934. The thief, Arsène Goedertier, returned Saint John the Baptist as a gesture of goodwill, but claimed on his deathbed that only he knew where The Just Judges was, and intended to take the secret to his grave... which he did. Belgian artist Jef Vanderveken produced a copy in 1945 that occupies the position of the lost panel today.
- On 20 May 2010, five paintings were stolen from the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, including Picasso's Le pigeon aux petits pois and works by Matisse, Modigliani, Braque, and Léger. The thief claimed that he panicked after a police raid and threw the Picasso in a dustbin, which was emptied before the painting could be recovered. The whereabouts of the other paintings are unknown.
- Seven paintings by Picasso, Matisse, Monet, Gauguin, Meyer de Haan, and Lucian Freud were stolen from Rotterdam's Kunsthal on the night of 15-16 October 2012. The mother of one of the thieves claimed she burned the paintings to destroy the evidence against her son, and though she later denied this in court, pigments and nails of the correct age for the paintings were found in her fireplace.
- In 1954, English artist Graham Sutherland was commissioned by donations from Members of the Houses of Commons and Lords to paint a portrait of then-Prime Minister Sir Winston Churchill for his 80th birthday. Churchill reportedly hated the portrait (Sutherland was inclined to paint "warts and all" depictions of his subjects rather than idealised versions), and it was taken to his country home in Chartwell but never put on display. After the death of Lady Clementine Churchill in 1977, it came to light that she had the painting burned at some point before her husband's death in 1965. Though some defended this as an exercise of the Churchills' right to do with their property as they saw fit, Sutherland and many art experts condemned the burning as an act of vandalism. Only photographs and Sutherland's sketches survive to attest to what the painting looked like.
- Marcel Duchamp's Fountain, a urinal laid on its back with the legend "R. Mutt 1917" painted on its rim, is one of the most iconic works of the Dadaist movement, and has been voted the most influential work of 20th century art. Shortly after its original exhibition, it vanished, never to be seen again; speculation is that art promoter Alfred Stieglitz, who organised the exhibition at which Fountain premiered, threw it out as rubbish (a fate which befell many of Duchamp's other "readymade" sculptures, such as Bicycle Wheel, a bicycle front wheel and fork mounted upside-down on a stool).
- One of the prize exhibits in the Berlin Egyptian Museum was a bust of the 12th dynasty woman pharaoh Sobekenefru
, the first statue of her to be found with a preserved face. Purchased in 1899, it was destroyed during World War II, and only photographs and plaster casts remain of it. - Of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World listed in many Ancient Greek travel guides, four were buildings,note one was a collection of gardens,note and two were statues, both now lost.
- The Colossus of Rhodes, a 108 foot tall sculpture of the sun titan-god Helios, toppled over after just 54 years when an earthquake hit Rhodes (Egyptian ruler Ptolemy III offered to re-build it, but the oracle at Delphi led the Rhodians to fear they had offended Helios, so they declined), but the fallen pieces remained a tourist draw until they were melted down in 653 by an invading force from the Umayyad Caliphate under Muawiyah I.
- The Statue of Zeus in the temple at Olympia was an ivory and gold statue of the greatest of the Greek deities, depicted sitting on a cedar throne covered with ebony, ivory, gold, and precious stones, created by the sculptor Phidias (whose gold and ivory sculpture of Athena resided in the Parthenon atop the Acropolis in Athens until it was removed by the Romans to an uncertain fate). The statue was destroyed 1500 years ago, and only pictures on Greek coins of the era offer us any idea of what it looked like.
- Of the seven tapestries that make The Hunt of the Unicorn only fragments remain of the fifth, believed to be of the unicorn being charmed by a virgin. In addition, scholars and amateur researchers disagree on the original meaning of the tapestries.
- The Bayeux Tapestry, an artistic rendition of the Battle of Hastings that is believed to date back to the 1070s, is missing at least two panels from the end, presumed to be the result of wear and tear; what survives may be as little as 90% complete. The missing panels are speculated to depict William the Conqueror's coronation as King of England following the battle, and several contemporary re-imaginings of the missing content have taken this angle.
- Stéphane Breitwieser is one of the most prolific art thieves in history, having admitted to stealing over 200 works of art from over 170 museums and galleries all over Europe, purely because of his personal love of art (such was his knowledge of his collection that he repeatedly corrected mistakes in the itemised list read at his trial); rather than selling them, he kept them in semi-darkness in his bedroom in the house of his mother, Mireille, to protect them from sunlight. However, when Breitwieser was arrested (for the first time) in 2001, his mother tried to dispose of as many of the stolen paintings as time permitted (whether out of anger at him or out of the mistaken belief that they were the only evidence against him is unclear), cutting up several dozen with scissors or shoving them into her kitchen garbage disposal. Although over 110 works were recovered, over 60 are still missing; among those known to have been destroyed by Mireille Breitwieser are Pieter Breughel the Younger's Cheat Profiting from His Master, François Boucher's Sleeping Shepherd, Corneille de Lyon's Madeleine of France, Queen of Scotland, and David Teniers' The Monkey's Ball.
