Art theft online.

IN A STRUGGLING world economy, top dollar art sales may be going down, but international art thefts are on the rise. Such a trend will certainly worry museum directors and church sacristans, especially in Latin America where valuables are often left unguarded in exhibition rooms and high altars.

One recent example was the pilfering of US$56 million worth of paintings by Picasso and Brazilian artist Candido Portinari from Sao Paulo's art museum. Police first thought that the theft was masterminded by international criminals, but it turned out to be a local job.

An even more curious robbery, that of a Goya engraving from his celebrated "Disasters of War" series, occurred in Bogota in September 2008. A ransom letter, later revealed to have been written by a prankster, said that the artwork had been stolen in protest of the museum's exorbitant entry fees. The engraving was later recovered, but the fake letter led local investigators on a wild goose chase, which inadvertently gave the real thieves more time for their getaway.

Luckily, the internet is providing better ways to report and recover stolen art objects from far and wide.

The international police consortium Interpol has long been a clearinghouse for this type of information. Its website maintains lists of stolen pieces, recovered pieces with identified owners, and unclaimed recovered pieces with unidentified owners. This last category of 181 "orphan" objects includes pieces from two major cases: a group of pre-Columbian Peruvian ceramics recovered in Germany, and a collection of colonial-era religious sculptures and paintings recovered in Ecuador.

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Interpol's list of unrecovered items, complete with photos, descriptions, and the countries where the theft occurred, currently contains 425 objects. Latin American countries are heavily represented. For example, Theft #2 is a portrait painting on wood stolen from Peru, titled "A Franciscan." Theft #423 is an eighteenth century painting on cotton titled "Woman and Miracle of Saint Anthony," stolen from Mexico. The 225 pieces that have been recently recovered and returned to their owners include a seventeenth century atlas of the New World, the Americae Nova Tabula, stolen from Finland and recovered in England in 2001, and an eighteenth century portrait of Saint Gregory stolen in Peru and recovered there in 2006.

Interpol is famous for its "Most Wanted International Criminals" poster, which it distributes worldwide. Now it also has a bi-annual poster of "Most Wanted Stolen Works of Art." The current edition lists a Diego Rivera painting of a little girl holding a doll, which was stolen from a private residence in Mexico in January 2008.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) of the US Department of Justice also keeps an art theft website including its most famous "Case Closed" reports. One report is of a gold Moche period body ornament from Peru. It was stolen in 1987 from the tomb of the "Lord of Sipan" and recovered in a sting operation by the FBI's Art Crime Team. The FBI's current list of Top Ten Art Crimes includes a theft from Rio de Janeiro's Museu Chacara do Ceu in February 2006, when four armed men stole paintings by Picasso, Matisse, Dali, and Monet.

In Brazil, the Ministerio da Cultura's Instituto do Patrimonio Historico e Artistico Nacional maintains a database of stolen art and cultural works--mostly religious objects from churches--belonging to the nation.

The Los Angeles Police Department in California posts files of art robberies in its jurisdiction and currently lists valuable missing paintings by Diego Rivera, Rufino Tamayo, and the seventeenth century colonial painter Juan Villalobos. Its case reports include a report on the partial recovery of a collection of 25 paintings by Colombian artist Luis Magin, stolen in 1987, and a 25-year-old "cold case" of stolen pre-Colombian ceramics that was recently solved.

With such case files now online, one no longer has to make do with far-fetched fiction like Clive Cussler's novel, Inca Gold, a tall tale about the supernatural and stolen treasure. The unvarnished facts of the world's largest art theft on record--the lifting of thirteen paintings, drawings, and objects worth $500 million from the Isabella Stewart Gardner museum in Boston in 1990--tell tales of snitches, dead men, a $5 million reward, and empty frames still on display. It makes for fascinating true-crime reading, and you can get it all on the museum's own website!