Spirited Away Art Thieves Target Europe1599s Churches_target属性和rel属性

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Spirited Away: Art Thieves Target Europe's Churches

Getting into the church was easy.The thieves probably walked in through the front door, posing as a few more of the faithful who come to bow their heads in St.John the Evangelist, the most important church in Capranica, 35 miles(56 km)north of Rome.They hid, waited to be locked in after the last people left, then went to work.They ignored the candlesticks, the alms box and the communion chalice: those are for amateurs — easy to grab, easy to sell.These were profeionals, and they were after something specific: the Via Crucis, or Stations of the Cro, 14 paintings each depicting a moment in Jesus' final hours.Painted in oil by an anonymous 18th century artist, these scenes were the church's most glorious features, its aesthetic soul.And on the black market, they could be worth hundreds of thousands of dollars.The thieves removed the framed canvases from the walls and lowered them through a window to the side street below.When they were done, they left the church through a tunnel that only a few people knew about.Once outside, they vanished, along with the paintings.That was November 2006, and Capranica's Stations of the Cro are still miing.During pre-Easter celebrations, when parishioners would traditionally recite all 14 stations using the paintings as their guide, they had to pray before 14 small wooden croes instead.The theft has left Capranica's small community with a sense of lo that is deep and personal, as if an old friend had disappeared.“We grew up with those paintings,” says Marina, who owns a card shop acro from St.John.“Yesterday,” adds her mother Maria, “I was looking at those nude walls and I felt as if someone had broken into my own home.” Millions of parishioners already know the feeling.Every year, thousands of churches, chapels and monasteries acro Europe are robbed of their most beloved and valuable artworks.From small-time crooks trying to earn drug money to seasoned pros who snatch maive canvases, art thieves are erasing a significant part of the religious heritage of some of the most culturally rich countries.“Our churches are being pillaged,” says Captain Dominique Lambert of France's Central Office for the Fight against Traffic in Cultural Goods(OCBC).“They take everything — statues, paintings, chalices, silverwork.When a Virgin Mary is stolen from a church after being there since the Middle Ages, that can't leave you indifferent.”

There are no reliable statistics on stolen art, since few countries have the motivation or the manpower to compile them.But information from Interpol, which collects data from member nations that volunteer it, helps give a sense of the scope of the problem.According to the most recent Interpol statistics, there were 1,785 reports of artwork stolen from places of worship in 2005, mainly in Italy, France and Ruia.While that's only half the number reported stolen from private homes, it's a huge tally compared to the 281 robberies from museums and 232 from art galleries and dealers that same year.And according to anecdotal evidence from police investigators, the number of reported art thefts from churches is holding steady or, in many cases, rising.In France, for example, the OCBC has recorded a 62% drop in stolen-art reports since 2002 — yet every year, thefts from churches hover between 200 and 300.“If it continues at the current rate,” says Lambert, “in 20 or 30 years, there won't be anything left.” Sacred art has always been big busine.Both the legal and illegal art markets are flooded with icons and artifacts that were stolen from holy sites in Africa, Asia and the Middle East.But the targeting of Christian art in Europe is relatively new, dating back only a few decades.Conflicts in Cyprus in the '70s, and in Yugoslavia in the '90s, along with the breakup of the Soviet Union, provided a fertile environment for widespread looting of religious art and icons, which have continued to flood the black market.At the same time, cheaper security systems have made it harder to steal from museums, galleries and homes.By comparison, Europe's unprotected churches offer easy pickings.Meanwhile, the one thing that churches have relied upon for centuries to protect them is no longer quite the deterrent it used to be.“The fear of God doesn't exist anymore,” laments Father Paolo Picca, pastor of the SS.Salvatore church in Velletri, Italy.“The thieves don't fear anyone, except maybe the police when they come to get them.” No Sanctuary

Nestled into a cliffside in the Greek mountains, just outside Leonidio, 120 miles(193 km)from Athens, the Elona Monastery doesn't usually get many visitors.But for one week of the year, it is packed.Every August, when Orthodox Christians celebrate the life of Jesus' mother, thousands of worshippers stream in, drawn by a 700-year-old gold-encrusted, jewel-covered painting of Mary and Jesus, which is said to hold miraculous healing powers.The small painting is one of Greece's most sacred icons.So when, one morning in August 2006, the monastery's Mother Superior followed a breeze to the back of the church and discovered that the painting was miing — its pine-and-resin cradle empty, climbing ropes dangling outside a broken window — she fell to her knees and prayed.The icon was recovered a month later, after one of the thieves called with a $1.7 million demand and the police tracked him down.But the theft sent a chilling meage that nothing is sacred.Greece is known as a tomb raider's paradise, with thieves plucking archaeological treasures straight from the ground.And while this looting is still one of the biggest challenges for the country's art squad, the theft of religious art is eclipsing it.In 2005, 333 liturgical items were reported stolen in Greece, compared with only eight archaeological artifacts.“There's a fresh fad for Byzantine icons,” says Giorgos Gligoris, head of Greece's art squad.“We expect the severity of these robberies to increase.”

Gligoris walks into a squalid room in the national police headquarters.Byzantine statues, antique candleholders and other religious items are scattered about — all recoveries from recent thefts.According to Gligoris, religious artworks can change hands up to five times, in several different countries, before reaching a collector's shelf.“Usually,” he says, “it's a job conducted by a criminal who wants to make a quick buck after hearing about or spotting a pricele treasure that's easily acceible.” The U.S.is home to the world's largest art market, so it follows that a lot of stolen art — from churches and elsewhere — eventually ends up there.That is, if it doesn't go to England(Europe's biggest art market), Japan, Ruia, India or any number of other nations with deep-pocketed collectors.Once a stolen work croes into another country, varying and often contradictory laws mean it can get trapped in legislative red tape for years, sometimes indefinitely.Better international cooperation is high on the wish lists of many an art squad.“The difficulty is convincing our European partners that we need to work together to fight this scourge,” says Lieut.Colonel Pierre Tabel, head of the OCBC.“If these countries are not going to effectively control their art market, well, we can't do it for them.” Greece, for one, has stopped wishing and started doing.In May, it entered a landmark pact with Switzerland, which, thanks to its reputation for financial discretion, has long been a favorite stopover for thieves moving hot goods onto the global black market.Swi law allows shipments to sit in its free-port zone for up to five years without going through customs.But now, with this agreement in hand, if Greek authorities suspect a consignment may contain stolen art, they can ask the Swi police to search it.Italy is looking to seal a similar deal with Switzerland.Whether it travels acro borders or to the nearest big city, art stolen from churches takes the same route as art stolen from anywhere else.Relatively nondescript pieces — vases, silverware, small paintings — might be sold at a local antiques fair or online.A more impreive work will make its way up the criminal food chain, paed from the thief to his fence to a crooked dealer, who draws up a fake provenance, to a gallery owner, who turns a blind eye, and so on, until it lands on the legitimate market, eventually bought by a collector, who may have no idea it was stolen.The money made from purloined art sometimes goes into the coffers of drug and arms dealers, even terrorists.“We have indisputable evidence that criminal networks are involved in art crime,” says Vernon Rapley, head of Scotland Yard's Art and Antiques Unit.There's no way to measure accurately how much the illicit art trade — which includes stolen art, fakes, forgeries and looted artifacts — is actually worth.But some estimates run as high as $6 billion a year.Still, what thieves gain from stealing art is outweighed by what their victims lose.Art historian Noah Charney observes, “There are very few stealable objects that have the same relationship as do artworks and the people who collect them.” With religious art, that relationship is intensified, thanks to the profound spiritual connection that many worshippers have to the work.It's this connection that makes churches such easy targets in the first place.After all, churches exist to help worshippers experience their faith more fully, and one way to achieve this is by giving them intimate acce to religious paintings, sculptures and ceremonial items.Unfortunately, that's the equivalent of putting all your valuables in your front yard and hoping nobody takes them.People don't mind when museums protect their icons by placing them in gla boxes.Likewise, galleries can ask visitors to check their bags at the door, while private collectors can rig their homes with the latest alarm systems.But in a church, even the smallest security measure is a barrier between believers and the symbols of their belief.“It's a huge dilemma,” says Gligoris, head of Greece's art squad.“I can't recall how many times I've urged bishops, abbots, monks and nuns to have religious treasures stored in controlled, guarded environments, and then only bring them out on religious holidays.Many won't hear of it.'We'll feel orphaned and deprived of our faith,' they say.” Saving Beauty

Looking like a cro between a very disorganized museum and the world's most expensive rummage sale, the vault at the OCBC's Paris headquarters is filled with stolen art that the team has recovered in recent months.Items from churches — including statues, lecterns, wooden pews, and bronze busts that belong in the Père-Lachaise cemetery — are packed on shelves, stacked against the walls and spread acro the floor.Alongside them are hundreds of pieces taken from museums, galleries, libraries, archaeological sites and private homes: paintings by Renoir and Courbet, sculptures by Rodin, lamps by Le Corbusier, 2,300-year-old Italian vases, centuries-old manuscripts, 19th century Cartel clocks.“We've got everything,” says Captain Jean-Luc Boyer.France's art squad is dedicated and well trained, and has acce to leading experts and all the high-tech gadgetry a cop could want.Ask Boyer to show you his team's most effective weapon against art crime, and he'll sit you down in front of a computer.The Thésaurus de Recherche Electronique et d'Imagerie en Matière Artistique(Electronic Research and Image Thesaurus for Artistic Material), a.k.a TREIMA, is the OCBC's stolen-art database, one of only two national databases like it in the world.Italy has one, called Leonardo;other countries either have only city-specific databases or none at all.Containing the photos and descriptions of some 72,000 items that have been reported stolen, TREIMA enables the user to figure out quickly if an artwork under investigation is hot, and who and where it was taken from — even if that user can't tell a Monet from a Munch.When the police come acro a suspicious item in a raid or gallery, say, they can search for it in the database using keywords and phrases.But TREIMA's real trick is its ability to run visual searches, too.If the police are lucky enough to have a picture of the item, the database will use image-recognition software to look for a match.To demonstrate, Boyer clicks on a JPEG of a sculpture of three cherubs that was stolen from a church a few years ago, then drags it into TREIMA.Almost instantly, the software finds a match with another photo of the same sculpture, taken from a different angle, in different light.“It's incredible,” Boyer marvels.Nonethele, even with equipment that could have come from an episode of CSI, Europe's art police can recover only a fraction of what goes miing.Italy's Carabinieri Tutela Patrimonio Culturale — considered the world's best art squad — employs nearly 300 officers(versus about 30 in France and six in Britain), along with a pool of informants, undercover agents and experts.It also has the largest database, holding information on 2.6 million miing artworks.Still, the carabinieri's recovery rate is only 10%, at best.It would help if people were more camera-happy.Taking photos of artworks before they go miing makes it much easier for police to find them once they're gone.That seems obvious, but few churches take the time to point and shoot.So insurers and investigators must find other ways to keep track of religious paintings and icons.Ecclesiastical Insurance, a company based in Gloucester, England, that insures 97% of the churches in the U.K., has given free Alpha-Dot kits to all its customers.Stuck on the frame of a painting or at the base of a statue, the tiny dots are almost invisible to the naked eye and each is imprinted with a unique number linking the artwork with its church.Meanwhile, Interpol recently proposed a scheme to insert identity chips into religious works, which would allow agents to track them if they ended up with auction houses or dealers.Of course, it's far better to prevent the art from being stolen in the first place.For churches, that means finding the delicate balance between security and sanctity.Solid locks on the doors, external lighting at night, an off-site safe to lock away valuables when the church is closed — the security measures don't have to be complicated or expensive.“You can do a lot with something as simple as a motion sensor and a length of fishing line,” says art historian Charney.“Attach the sensor to the fishing line, then hang it on an object that's never supposed to move.” Charney has grown so concerned about the theft of religious art that he recently formed the Aociation for Research into Crimes against Art, a nonprofit think tank that will provide churches with free advice on how to protect art on a limited budget.For many, though, it's too late.Some churches have already made the painful decision to put their religious works under gla.At the Elona Monastery outside Leonidio, the Mary and Jesus icon now rests in a steel compartment with a bulletproof-gla front.A sensible measure, no doubt, but hardly a sign of faith in the goodne of human nature.千与千寻：艺术大盗目标欧洲的教堂

走进教堂入门很容易。这些小偷很可能走在前门，作为忠实谁要来俯伏在圣约翰的传播者，在最重要的教堂卡普拉尼卡，35英里（56公里），罗马北部的头几个构成。他们躲起来，等着在人离开后，最后锁定，然后去上班了。他们忽略了烛台，施舍箱和共融酒杯：那些业余选手雕塑，绘画，圣餐杯，银器当圣母被盗后，因为有从中世纪教堂，这是不能离开你无动于衷。” 被盗艺术品上有没有可靠的统计数字，因为很少国家有动机或人手编译它们。但是，从国际刑警组织，收集数据，从各会员国自愿的，有助于给出了问题的范围意义上的信息。根据最近的国际刑警组织统计，共有1,785艺术品失窃的宗教场所在2005年，主要在意大利，法国和俄罗斯的报告。虽然这只是报告数的一半来自私营安老院被盗，这是一个巨大的博物馆相比，理货和232 281从艺术画廊和经销商，同年劫案。而据警方调查传闻证据，举报盗窃艺术品从教堂人数保持稳定，甚至在许多情况下，不断上升。在法国，例如，华侨银行录得自2002年以来被盗的先进报告62％的跌幅它的松树和树脂的摇篮空，登山绳外破窗晃来晃去从近期的盗窃所有回收率。据Gligoris，宗教艺术品可以转手至五倍，在几个不同的国家，才到达一个收藏家的货架。

“通常，”他说，“这是一个犯罪谁愿意让或检举后，听到一个无价宝藏的急功近利方便进行工作。”

美国是拥有世界上最大的艺术品市场，因此它遵循的是，很多被盗艺术品最终结束在那里。也就是说，如果不去英国（欧洲最大的艺术市场），日本，俄罗斯，印度或其他国家的任何与资金雄厚的收藏家的人数。一旦被盗工作跨越到另一个国家，不同的和相互矛盾的法律往往意味着它可以在立法被困多年的繁文缛节，有时下去。更好的国际合作是一种艺术上的许多球队的愿望清单高。

“困难是说服我们的欧洲伙伴，我们需要携手合作，打击这一灾祸，”上尉说。皮埃尔Tabel上校，华侨银行头。

“如果这些国家不会有效地控制自己的艺术市场，那么，我们不能为他们做吧。”

希腊来说，已经停止希望，开始做。今年5月，进入了一个与瑞士，其中，以决定其财务声誉下，长期以来一直是全球移动到黑市场热点商品盗贼最喜欢停留具有里程碑意义的协议。瑞士法律允许出货量将参加在长达五年的自由港区海关将不通过。但现在，这个协议在手，如果希腊当局怀疑可能含有货物被盗艺术品，他们可以要求瑞士警方搜查。意大利期待与瑞士一封类似的协议。

无论是跨越国界或到最近的大城市旅行，从教堂被盗艺术品需要从其他地方为被盗艺术品同样的路线。花瓶，银器，小画其中包括被盗艺术品，假货，伪造和掠夺文物Lachaise墓地属于即使该用户不能告诉莫奈从蒙克。当在一个可疑物品来，在警方突袭或画廊，也就是说，他们可以在数据库中搜索使用关键字和词组它。

但是TREIMA的真正的技巧在于它能够运行Visual搜索了。如果警方有足够幸运有一个项目的图片，该数据库将利用图像识别软件，寻找一个匹配。为了证明，在一个三小天使雕塑，是从教堂偷来的，几年前，JPEG格式，然后点击博耶拖入TREIMA它。几乎立即发现该软件与另一个相同雕塑的照片从不同的角度考虑，在不同的光线，一个匹配。

“这是令人难以置信，”博耶的奇迹。

然而，设备，即使是那些可能沪深来自一个小插曲，欧洲的艺术警察只能恢复丢失的一小部分去什么。意大利宪兵监护Patrimonio Culturale拥有员工近300名官员（相对于30在法国和英国6个），以及一个线人，特工人员和专家库。它也拥有最大的数据库，持有260万失踪艺术品的信息。不过，荣誉军团的回收率只有10％，最好的。

如果这将有助于人们更摄像高兴。以艺术品照片前，他们失踪使得它更容易找到警察他们一旦走了。这似乎是显而易见的，但很少花时间去教堂点和拍摄。因此，保险公司和调查人员必须寻找其他途径来的宗教绘画和图标的轨道。教会保险，在Gloucester，英国，这确保了在英国97％的教会的一家公司，给了免费的阿尔法点包到所有的客户。对绘画或在一个雕像底座卡住，小点的几乎肉眼看不见的，每一方都具有其独特的连接数印迹教堂艺术品。与此同时，国际刑警组织最近提出一项计划，将芯片插入身份宗教作品，这将让代理商追踪他们，如果他们最终与拍卖行或经销商注册。

当然，这要好得多防止被盗摆在首位的艺术。教堂，那就是要寻找安全和尊严之间的微妙平衡。固锁在门，到了晚上，场外安全锁定离开时，教堂被关闭贵重物品的外部照明-保安措施并没有那么复杂或昂贵。

“你可以用像运动传感器和一个简单的鱼线长度的东西很多，”艺术史家查尼说。

“附加到鱼线传感器，然后挂在一这绝不应该移动对象。” 查尼增长如此关心宗教艺术盗窃，他最近形成了犯罪的打击艺术研究协会，一个非营利性智库将提供关于如何保护在预算有限的艺术免费咨询教会关注。

对于许多人来说，虽然，它的为时已晚。有些教会已经作出痛苦的决定，把玻璃下的宗教作品。在外面Leonidio Elona修道院，玛丽和耶稣图标现在掌握在一个有防弹玻璃钢车厢前面。一个明智的措施，毫无疑问，但几乎没有一个信仰，在人性善良的迹象。