Over one month since the theft of French sculptor Auguste Rodin’s ‘Man with the Broken Nose’ from Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek Museum in Copenhagen, Denmark, police have released CCTV footage of the two chief suspects.
The images show the two men disguised as tourists on the day the 25.5cm bronze statue was stolen on July 16 and during another visit over a week earlier when the police believe they disabled the sculpture’s alarm, Euronews reported on Friday (August 21).
“It was a very professional job, very organized and there is the possibility there is an international connection,” explained the Copenhagen police commissioner Ove Randrup. “They were in the museum, familiarized themselves with the workings of it and left everything prepared for the theft of the statue”.
According to museum officials, it took the thieves 12 minutes to snatch the Rodin bust from 1863, which is worth over $300,000.
The bust is thought to depict an elderly Parisian workman, and is one of the artist’s early works. It was one of many casts the artist made of the clay original. The Musée Rodin Museum in Paris has a version in marble.
“If somebody wants to sell art and get the best price then you have to put it on the international market,” said Kasper Nielsen, an assessment and sales director from Bruun Rasmussen Auctioneers. “A lot of people are monitoring sales so when something pops up that is stolen, it is immediately discovered”.
The thieves were able to walk away from the Glyptotek museum during opening hours without being stopped.
Both Interpol and Europol are involved in the search.
The brazen robbers aren’t the first to stage a daytime heist: a man tucked $63,000 Elisabeth Frink statue under his arm and walked out of a London gallery in July, while thieves made off with three paintings at Milan’s Sforza Castle in August.
