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Arthur Brand is not only a Dutch art historian. He’s famous in the art world for tracking down works of art that are either believed to have been lost or destroyed. He has managed to recover what is perhaps the greatest find of his life. It’s a 1,600 year old mosaic of Siant Marks from the Byzantine era that was stolen from a Cyprus church in the 1970s.
CNN reports that Brand has recovered more than 200 works of art so far, ranging from Surrealist paintings to artwork that was stolen by the Nazis. He recovered two horse sculptures by Josef Thorak in 2015 that stood outside Adolph Hitler’s Reichstag building.
He was able to trace them using archival documents, satellite images, and military informants to locate the sculptures that were believed to have been lost in the Battle of Berlin. He then created a fake art buyer persona to obtain more information about them before tipping off German law enforcement.
He has been hunting this 1,600 year old mosaic for the past three years. The Agence France-Presse reports that he started looking for it when an art dealer tipped him off that the mosaic was in Monaco. He used several intermediaries, including some in the underground art scene, to locate the apartment where the mosaic was. The owner had actually inherited it from his father who apparently didn’t know it was stolen when he bought it in the 1970s.
“They were horrified when they found out that it was, in fact, a priceless art treasure, looted from the Kanakaria Church after the Turkish invasion,” Brand told AFP. The owner agreed to give back the artwork in exchange for payment to cover the restoration and storage cost. The mosaic is reportedly worth up to $11.4 million and Brand says that finding it was “one of the greatest moments of my life.” It has since been returned to its rightful home in Cyprus.
Filed in .. Source: gizmodo