AI Spots a Stolen Saint Hiding in Plain Sight

The original painting of Saint Agense had been stolen from a church near the Italian city of Naples in 2004 (Credit: Carabinieri Command for the Protection of Cultural Heritage)

A painting missing for 20 years turned up at an antiquities fair in Parma, Italy, thanks to AI, the BBC reports. When police strolled through the fair in October 2024, snapping photos of the artworks on display, they weren’t admiring the art. Within hours, their AI system flagged one image: a young woman in aquamarine and red holding a half-unrolled scroll.

Investigators discovered it was a 17th-century painting of Saint Agnese, stolen from a church in Sulmona in August 2004 and apparently disguised since: her lamb had become a scroll, and her halo and palm branch had been erased. A keyword search for “woman with a scroll” would never have found it, but the software, which matches colors, patterns, and composition, did.

Called the Stolen Works of Art Detection System (Swoads), the tool has helped Italy’s cultural heritage police recover more than 300 large paintings and statues, plus more than 165,000 smaller objects, worth over €203 million combined since its introduction in November 2023.

An image of the original painting showing the lamb was painted over to make the artwork less recognisable (Credit: Carabinieri Command for the Protection of Cultural Heritage)

Experts caution that AI is no silver bullet. It can’t catch thieves or flag works that were never reported stolen, and it struggles with three-dimensional objects and poor training data. Former FBI Art Crime Team head Timothy Carpenter notes that chasing its leads takes large teams: Italy’s art crime unit has about 300 personnel, while the FBI’s, at its largest, had 24. Criminals, he adds, can also use AI to alter images or fabricate provenance.

Italian investigators hope to build an international identification network by 2027, as similar tools emerge in Turkey, France, Germany, and the U.S.

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Artist Sneaks His Own Painting Into the Met

While museum heists dominate headlines worldwide, a Los Angeles artist has done the opposite: he added a work to the walls of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, Hyperallergic reports.

In a viral Instagram reel, David (Sabastian) Miklatski documents how he created and surreptitiously installed the piece in one of The Met’s galleries this past Sunday. The work, titled The MET 2027, is an oil pastel painting of a Met Gala attendee ascending the museum’s staircase, flanked by shrubs and photojournalists, while police in riot gear beat protesters in a fiery scene in the foreground.

The video intercuts clips of celebrities such as Zendaya and Sabrina Carpenter being photographed at the Met Gala with footage of crises around the world, including mining conditions in the Congo, riots in Paris and Milan, homelessness in the United States, the conflict in Gaza, gang violence in Haiti, and Russia’s bombing of Ukraine.

A closer look at Miklatski’s work, which is a commentary on the polar extremes of life

Miklatski says the painting captures the “absurdity of it all”: “A-list celebrities prancing, while the world outside the museum gates is collapsing.”

The artwork was removed from the museum’s wall later the same day.