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THE OBSIDIAN REGISTRY

MIRROR: cf2fdec6dacadccd.onion/empty-frames

The Empty Frames · art and media

A gallery of things you will never see.

Stolen and never found. Burned by people who were afraid of them. Painted over, sued out of existence, or simply lost. Every frame on this page is empty on purpose. The stories behind them are real.

Stolen, never foundThe frames are still hanging. The paintings are not.

REWARD $10,000,000

Boston, 1990

The Gardner Museum heist

Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum

Two men dressed as police officers talked their way in and left with 13 works, including a Vermeer and three Rembrandts. Value: about $500 million. Reward: $10 million. The empty frames still hang on the walls, exactly where the paintings were.¹

MISSING 57 YEARS

Palermo, 1969

Caravaggio's Nativity

FBI Top Ten Art Crimes

Cut from its frame in a chapel in Sicily, reportedly by the Mafia. It has never been recovered. Some informants say it was eaten by rats. Some say it was burned. Nobody knows.²

LAST SEEN 1945

Saint Petersburg, 1941

The Amber Room

An entire room paneled in amber and gold, called the eighth wonder of the world. Nazi troops dismantled it and shipped it to Konigsberg. In 1945 it vanished. Treasure hunters are still looking. A replica opened in 2003.³

Destroyed on purposeSomebody decided these should not exist. Somebody was obeyed.

~5,000 WORKS

Berlin, 1939

The bonfire of degenerate art

After mocking modern art in a 1937 exhibition, the Nazis burned some 5,000 confiscated works in the courtyard of a Berlin fire station on March 20, 1939.⁴

Related: File 063

BURNED MAY 1945

Austria, 1945

Klimt's Faculty Paintings

Three huge ceiling paintings for the University of Vienna, rejected as obscene, stored in a castle for safekeeping during the war. SS troops set the castle on fire as they retreated. Only black and white photographs survive.⁵

1,500 YEARS OLD

Afghanistan, 2001

The Buddhas of Bamiyan

UNESCO

Two giant statues carved into a cliff around 1,500 years ago. The Taliban destroyed them with explosives and artillery over several weeks in March 2001.⁶

FLORENCE, 1497

Florence, 1497

The Bonfire of the Vanities

A preacher named Savonarola convinced the city to burn mirrors, cosmetics, books, and art in the main square. Legend says Botticelli threw in some of his own paintings. A year later, the city burned Savonarola.

Censored, covered, bannedArt that survived, but not the way it was made.

COVERED 1565

Vatican, 1565

The Last Judgment's underwear

After the Council of Trent, a painter named Daniele da Volterra was hired to paint drapery over the nudity in Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel fresco. He was nicknamed Il Braghettone, the underpants maker, forever.⁷

ORDERED DESTROYED

Germany, 1925

Nosferatu, sentenced to death

The 1922 vampire film was an unauthorized version of Dracula. Bram Stoker's widow sued, and a German court ordered every copy destroyed. A few survived. It is now considered one of the greatest films ever made.⁸

1,000+ WORKS

Munich, 2012

The Gurlitt hoard

Customs investigators found more than a thousand artworks, many suspected of being looted by the Nazis, in the apartment of an elderly recluse whose father had been one of Hitler's art dealers.⁹

Lost mediaNobody stole it and nobody burned it. It is simply gone.

LAST PRINT 1965

Hollywood, 1927

London After Midnight

A Lon Chaney horror film. The last known print burned in an MGM vault fire in 1965. It is one of the most searched-for lost films in the world. Only stills survive.¹⁰

75% LOST

America, 1912 to 1929

Three quarters of all silent films

Library of Congress

A 2013 Library of Congress study found that only 14 percent of American silent feature films survive in their original format, and about 75 percent are lost completely.¹¹

97 MISSING

BBC, 1960s

The missing Doctor Who episodes

The BBC routinely wiped and reused videotape to save money. 97 episodes are still missing. Copies occasionally turn up in old TV stations in other countries.¹²

Hunt for themEvery one of these is still being looked for.

Report a sighting

FBI National Stolen Art File

The FBI's searchable database of stolen art. If you ever see one of these at a yard sale, you will want this link.

Search the world

Interpol ID-Art

Interpol's app for checking artworks against its stolen art database.

Nazi-looted art

German Lost Art Database

German Lost Art Foundation

A public database of art lost or looted between 1933 and 1945.

Lost media

The Lost Media Wiki

Volunteers hunting for lost films, shows, games, songs, and commercials. Sometimes they find them.

Before it disappears

The Internet Archive

The Wayback Machine and millions of films, books, and recordings. Digital things disappear faster than paintings ever did.

Sources

1
Thirteen works were stolen from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum on March 18, 1990; the museum offers a $10 million reward and keeps the empty frames on display.Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, “Theft”
2
Caravaggio's Nativity with St. Francis and St. Lawrence was stolen from the Oratory of San Lorenzo, Palermo, in October 1969 and is on the FBI's list of top art crimes.FBI, “Top Ten Art Crimes”
3
The Amber Room was looted from the Catherine Palace by German forces in 1941 and disappeared in 1945; a reconstruction was completed in 2003.Smithsonian Magazine, “A Brief History of the Amber Room” (2007)
4
The Nazis burned some 5,000 confiscated works in the courtyard of Berlin's main fire station on March 20, 1939.Jewish Currents, “March 20: A Bonfire of Degenerate Art”
5
Klimt's Faculty Paintings were destroyed when retreating SS forces set fire to Schloss Immendorf in May 1945.Neue Galerie and Belvedere Museum, Gustav Klimt catalogue materials
6
The Buddhas of Bamiyan were destroyed by the Taliban in March 2001.UNESCO World Heritage Centre, “Cultural Landscape and Archaeological Remains of the Bamiyan Valley”
7
Daniele da Volterra painted over nudity in Michelangelo's Last Judgment after the Council of Trent, earning the nickname Il Braghettone.Vatican Museums, “Sistine Chapel”
8
After a lawsuit by Florence Stoker, a German court ordered copies of Nosferatu destroyed in 1925.David J. Skal, Hollywood Gothic (W. W. Norton, 1990)
9
In 2012, authorities found more than 1,000 works in Cornelius Gurlitt's Munich apartment; his father Hildebrand Gurlitt dealt art for the Nazi regime.German Lost Art Foundation, “Gurlitt Provenance Research”
10
The last known print of London After Midnight (1927) was destroyed in the 1965 MGM vault fire.Library of Congress; Turner Classic Movies
11
A 2013 Library of Congress study found 14 percent of 10,919 American silent feature films survive in original format and about 75 percent are lost.David Pierce, The Survival of American Silent Feature Films: 1912 to 1929 (Library of Congress and CLIR, 2013)
12
97 episodes of Doctor Who from the 1960s remain missing after the BBC wiped videotapes.BBC, Doctor Who missing episodes records