The Gardner Museum returned the paintings of Rembrandt stolen 28 years ago. But there is a nuance

Late at night on March 18, 1990, the largest robbery in the history of art took place: the attackers, pretending to be policemen, entered the Gardner Museum in Boston with the light hand of a security guard and an hour and a half later took out 13 canvases with a total value of $ 500 million.

23 years later, the crime was solved by the FBI, but the location of the exhibits remains a mystery to this day. Among the stolen canvases are rare paintings by Rembrandt (including his only seascape), Manet, Degas and Govert Flink, which the criminals cut out of baguettes.

Recently, the museum teamed up with a startup in the field of augmented reality and "returned" some of the paintings to its collection.

While the masterpieces were missing, the robbery had already become part of popular culture: films and books have been made based on his motives, and recently a popular podcast was launched in which enthusiasts try to take a fresh look at the case and sort through the story in the hope of finding some clue.

Sketch of the suspects

Meanwhile, art fans in the ranks of the Cuseum company decided to help the museum restore the cultural heritage and return the paintings digitally. The development team used augmented reality technology available in Apple's ARKit to project the image of the stolen painting to the right point at the right angle. Thus, using an iPad, you can look through the camera at empty frames and see canvases.

The application will become available after the next OS update. So far, visitors will be able to restore only two missing works — "A man and a woman in black" and "Christ during a Storm on the Sea of Galilee" by Rembrandt. The authors of the project promise to continue working on the remaining exhibits.

"Christ during a storm on the Sea of Galilee""A man and a woman in black"

Brendan Sitsko

For developers, this project is charitable. The work on the application is not paid in any way and is not sponsored by the museum.

But this is a good opportunity for promotion — the startup has been cooperating with cultural centers for a long time, offering an interactive experience of interacting with exhibits. With the Cuseum applications, viewers, walking through the museum, can listen to the history of art objects in different languages and automatically find short information about the exhibits by pointing their smartphone at them.