the Art of CRIME: A History Murder, Scandal and Darkness at Heart Western

In 1534, Benvenuto Cellini killed a man in the streets of Rome and was pardoned by the Pope the same afternoon. In 1869, Dante Gabriel Rossetti had his dead wife exhumed to retrieve the poems he had buried with her. In 1970, three executors sold a great painter's entire estate to a gallery one of them secretly worked for, three weeks after his death. The Art of Crime tells fifteen stories from five centuries of Western art in which murder, fraud, sexual violence, forgery and institutional corruption intersect with the making of some of the greatest paintings and sculptures in human history. From Caravaggio's killing of Ranuccio Tomassoni to the unsolved death of Ana Mendieta; from Han van Meegeren's fake Vermeer in Hermann Göring's private collection to the conspiracy that stripped the Rothko estate of thirty million dollars - these are not aberrations at the edge of art history. They are at its centre. What connects them is not the darkness of individual artists but the darkness of the conditions that produced them: wealth, patronage, the concentration of power in a small number of institutions, and the ancient, persistent confusion between the maker and what they make. The crime is not the footnote to the story of Western art. In many cases, it is part of the story itself.