"The Museum of Lost Art": Examining the vulnerability of the world's treasures

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Carolyn Riccardelli will never forget the day in 2002 when a sculpture named Adam took a terrible fall. The conservator for the Metropolitan Museum of Art says the 6-foot-3-inch "Adam" was gravely damaged after his plywood pedestal buckled.

"I went upstairs and I saw the sculpture in pieces all over the floor. … He was in 28 large pieces and hundreds of small pieces," Riccardelli told CBS News' Dana Jacobson.

"This is one of the most important sculptures from the early Renaissance. Certainly in the western hemisphere outside of Italy. And when something like this breaks, we couldn't accept the loss," she said. 
 
"Adam" is one of the pieces author and art historian Noah Charney examined in his new book about the vulnerability of the world's treasures, "The Museum of Lost Art." How big would a museum of lost art be? Charney says "bigger than all the museums of the world combined."

"It would have works by every artist you've heard of because there really isn't an artist to exist who doesn't have works that are lost," Charney said. 

Some lost works are due to theft, like the 13 masterpieces snatched from Boston's Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in 1990. The stolen art is valued at around half a billion dollars and included a Rembrandt and Vermeer. 

"The theft from the Gardner museum took place on St. Patrick's Day night. And two people dressed as policemen knocked on the employee entrance and against regulations the security guards that night let them in. The security guards were seized and tied up and gagged and put down in the basement and for about 40 minutes these two thieves went through the museum and they took 13 objects. They stomped on certain works of art that suggests that they were sort of oblivious to their value but they were very careful with others and those works have never been found again. It's the big mystery there's many detectives proactively looking for. There's a $5 million reward if you happen to know where they are and it's a thorn in the side of the FBI and the investigators because it's been an open case for so long," Charney said.

"Few people realize that art that has been called the third highest grossing criminal trade worldwide behind only the drug and arms trade. It's absolutely enormous and by far the biggest problem is illicit trade in antiquities and that's been highlighted in 2015 since it's been overtly clear that ISIS was making a lot of money by selling looted antiquities. So it also funds terrorism. So whether or not you're an art lover it's important to take it seriously," Charney said. 
 
Long before ISIS, there were other wartime villains far worse, according to Charney.

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