Despite the best efforts of museums and art collectors, many of the world’s most important paintings and sculptures no longer exist. Some of these artworks were lost in wars, burned in fires or destroyed by unhappy patrons, while others were stolen by master thieves or simply vanished with the passage of time. From a Russian national treasure looted by the Nazis to a da Vinci painting that no one has ever seen, find out more about eight of art history’s missing masterworks.
One of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, this massive bronze statue of the sun god Helios towered over the Greek city of Rhodes for most of the 3rd century B.C. The behemoth stood 110 feet tall, and reportedly took the sculptor Chares of Lindos a full 12 years to complete. But while the Colossus surely proved an incredible sight for visitors to the city’s bustling harbor, it stood for only 56 years before toppling in a 226 B.C. earthquake. The once mighty statue then lay in ruins for another several centuries before Arab merchants sold off its remains for scrap. No drawings of the Colossus of Rhodes survive today, but ancient sources note that Helios was depicted standing with a torch held in his outstretched hand. These descriptions later served as an inspiration for Frederic Bartholdi’s design of the Statue of Liberty.
Several of Leonardo da Vinci’s works have been lost to time, but the “Medusa Shield” is perhaps the most mysterious. Painted when the Italian master was in his youth, this early work supposedly took the form of a shield emblazoned with a creature inspired by the snake-haired Greek monster Medusa. According to a 1550 account by art historian Giorgio Vasari, the painting was so realistic that it initially frightened Leonardo’s father, who considered it a macabre masterpiece and secretly sold it to a group of Florentine merchants. The shield has long since vanished, and some modern experts now argue that Vasari’s account may have been little more than a myth.
Painted in 1849, this classic example of social realism was hailed for its unsentimental depiction of poor laborers, one young and one old, removing rocks from a roadside. Inspired by a chance meeting with two downtrodden workers, Courbet deliberately broke with convention by capturing the men in gritty detail, from their straining muscles to their tattered and dirty clothing. While it helped launch Courbet’s art career, “The Stone Breakers” was ultimately doomed to become one of the many cultural casualties of World War II. In 1945, the painting was destroyed during an Allied bombing near the city of Dresden, Germany.