The Vault

The most valuable things in Europe keep disappearing. True crime stories about lost art.Art theft, museum heists, and stolen treasures, the stories behind Europe's most dramatic cultural crimes. From the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum to Nazi looted art, told with the warmth of an art historian and the precision of a detective.New episodes every Wednesday.

The Vault is a arts podcast hosted by Unknown Host, with 19 episodes on record and a Required Pod Score of 81. PitchCentric scores this show on Booking Probability, Listen Score, and live audience signals refreshed every 24 hours.

Unknown Host hosts The Vault, a arts show with 19 episodes published.

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  Episode #18

  The Just Judges

  May 5, 202610 minS0

  Ghent, Belgium, the night of 10-11 April 1934. One panel of twelve, cut out of a fifteenth-century altarpiece in Saint Bavo's Cathedral. Never recovered. The single most famous unsolved art theft in northern European history. The altarpiece is the Adoration of the Mystic Lamb — known as the Ghent Altarpiece — painted between 1426 and 1432 by Hubert and Jan van Eyck. Twelve hinged oak panels. One of the foundational works of Northern Renaissance painting. By 1934 it had already been looted by Napoleonic France (1794) and would later be looted by Nazi Germany (1940). All those have been recovered. Except this one panel: the Just Judges, the lowe...

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  Episode #19

  The Schiphol Diamond Heist

  May 5, 20269 minS0

  Schiphol Airport, the Netherlands, 4 AM on Friday 25 February 2005. Two men in KLM uniforms, in a stolen KLM cargo van, drive through a perimeter gate of the cargo terminal. The single guard with a clipboard waves them through — the uniforms are correct, the van logo is correct, it is a routine pre-dawn cargo movement. They drive across the tarmac to a holding bay where a sealed shipping container is waiting to be loaded onto a 6 AM KLM flight to Tel Aviv. The container holds approximately a hundred and eighteen million dollars in uncut industrial diamonds. They hold up the bay guard at...

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  Episode #15

  The Hatton Garden Heist

  May 5, 20269 minS0

  London, Easter weekend 2015. A small group of British career criminals — average age 62, the eldest of them 76 — drilled their way into a safe-deposit vault below the central London jewellery district over a four-day Bank Holiday closure. They climbed through a lift shaft, assembled a 75-kilogram industrial diamond core drill in the basement, and cut three overlapping circular holes in 50 centimetres of reinforced concrete. They emptied 73 of the 195 boxes. Walked out the front door with the haul packed into wheelie bins, in daylight, on a London pavement. They returned for a second night. Estimated total take: between £14 million and £20 million in cash, gold a...

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  Episode #16

  The Caravaggio

  May 5, 20269 minS0

  Palermo, Sicily, the night of 17-18 October 1969. A heavy rainstorm has emptied the streets. Two men force the front door of the Oratorio di San Lorenzo, a small Baroque oratory in the centre of the old city, walls entirely covered in Giacomo Serpotta's seventeenth-century white stucco. They walk past everything except a single painting hanging above the altar. It is Caravaggio's Nativity with St. Francis and St. Lawrence. Painted in 1609, in the last year of his life. Fourteen square metres of canvas, dramatic chiaroscuro, the holy family attended by two saints, the Madonna's red robe in the lit centre. It...

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  Episode #17

  The Singer Laren Van Gogh

  May 5, 20268 minS0

  The Netherlands, 30 March 2020. The third week of the first European COVID lockdown. The streets of the small wooded village of Laren, thirty kilometres east of Amsterdam, are emptier at three in the morning than they have been at any point in fifty years. A single man approaches the locked front door of the Singer Laren Museum with a sledgehammer. The doors give. He walks through the entrance hall, turns left at a specific corridor, walks past three other paintings without pausing, and arrives at the wall where Van Gogh's "Parsonage Garden at Nuenen in Spring" — on long-term loan from the Gr...

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