The theft of artworks and valuable objects from European museums has been making headlines more frequently in the past year, since the elaborate heist at the Louvre in October 2025. The most recent case occurred last Thursday, August 27, when two unidentified men entered the Museum of Applied Arts in Vienna during opening hours. The robbers bought tickets, had their faces uncovered, and were captured by security cameras. They used a hammer to break a glass display case in the Van Cleef & Arpels jewelry exhibition, stole a necklace, and fled. No one was injured.
The stolen piece is a platinum Van Cleef & Arpels necklace with 673 diamonds, totaling more than 200 carats, valued at millions of dollars. The necklace was created for the Egyptian royal family and worn by Queen Nazli in 1939, at the wedding of her daughter, Princess Fawzia, to Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, then Iran's crown prince and later the country's last Shah. It was sold at Sotheby's in New York for 4.3 million dollars in 2015.
The necklace was part of the "Glanzstücke" exhibition, which brought together Van Cleef & Arpels jewelry and pieces from the MAK's collection, totaling around 500 objects. The exhibition, opened in June, was scheduled to close on September 27, but is now closed indefinitely following this incident.
The theft recalls a heist that made headlines in Austria in 2003, when Benvenuto Cellini's "Saliera," a gold and enamel work valued at approximately 50 million euros, was stolen from the Museum of Art History in Vienna by a thief who climbed a scaffold and entered through a window. The work was recovered three years later.
