The concealment-and-failed-sale pattern — hiding a stolen work while trying unsuccessfully to monetize it — is similarly common. Major stolen artworks are exceptionally difficult to sell precisely because their fame makes them impossible to authenticate discreetly. The more famous the work, the more completely the theft defeats the financial purpose of the theft. Peruggia’s 500,000 lire was never paid. The Gardner thieves’ works have never been sold, as far as anyone has established. The thieves who took works from the Munch Museum in Oslo in 2004 — including Edvard Munch’s *The Scream* — eventually saw the works recovered without ever successfully monetizing them.
The lesson that professional art thieves have drawn from these precedents is that famous works are essentially unsellable through any legitimate or quasi-legitimate channel. The only viable buyers are individuals willing to hold stolen works in private, unable to display them or authenticate them publicly. The market for stolen masterworks is thus limited to a category of collector who values private possession over public recognition — a category whose size has been debated but which cannot be large.
Peruggia did not understand this. He thought the painting was valuable in a way that could be converted to cash. He was wrong, in the specific sense that the painting’s value was inseparable from its provenance, its institutional history, and its public accessibility. The 500,000 lire he demanded was, in a practical sense, an impossible sum: there was no path by which he could collect it without being immediately arrested.
This is the economic paradox of stealing extremely famous artworks: the more valuable the work, the more impossible the theft’s financial goal.