Thieves have made off with a 150kg (330lb) book cover designed by Salvador Dalí from a French museum.
The bronze cover of Livre de l’Apocalypse – also known as the Book of Revelation or the Apocalypse of St John – was stolen from the Centre d’art contemporain in Issoire, in the Puy-de-Dôme, central France, overnight on Sunday.
The Clermont-Ferrand prosecutor’s office described the work, decorated with gold, precious stones and seashells, as an “exceptional and unique” artwork of “great value”.
Police are baffled as to how the thieves made off with such a huge object unnoticed.
The cover alone weighs 150kg, while the complete book weighs 210kg – making it one of the world’s heaviest.
Salvador Dali squirting paint from a tube on to a metal plate to produce a painting for the Apocalypse of St John – Keystone/Hulton Archive/Getty
Police have not said how the thieves managed to remove it or even whether they broke into the museum.
Bertrand Barraud, the mayor of Issoire, said the loss was “inestimable” and described the piece as “the work of a lifetime”.
Christian Karoutzos, the work’s owner, said its theft was tantamount to an attack on France itself.
“They assassinated France last night, they assassinated French heritage,” he told local radio.
The monumental tome was conceived in 1958 by Joseph Forêt, an Auvergne art publisher, and inspired by the Bible’s Book of Revelation.
It brought together 14 leading artists and writers of the 20th century, including Jean Cocteau, Bernard Buffet and Jean Giono, while Dalí, the Spanish surrealist, sculpted its elaborate bronze cover.
Dali and artist colleagues work on the cover – Pierre Vauthey/Sygma via Getty
The complete work contains 150 enormous parchment sheets, selected from 300,000 sheepskins, while its calligraphy took 2,000 hours to complete and included 550 letters picked out in gold.
After being shown in almost 150 exhibitions around the world between 1961 and 1972, the work disappeared from public view for a time, was stored in Switzerland and later sold to Japanese owners.
They were preparing to sell it off piece by piece when Mr Karoutzos, the head of an art-restoration company in Issoire, acquired it in 2003.
Mr Karoutzos had been displaying the Dalí cover alongside several of the parchment pages at his museum until the autumn.
The exhibition space dedicated to the Book of Revelation
The gendarmerie’s Clermont-Ferrand research brigade is investigating the theft.
The Dalí theft is the latest in a spate of raids on French museums.
In October last year, thieves broke into the Louvre’s Apollo Gallery during the day and made off with Crown Jewels valued at some €88m, dropping Empress Eugénie’s crown as they fled.
In July, masked men smashed their way into the Lalique Museum in Alsace and stole 27 pieces worth €4.5m in only 11 minutes. That same month, thieves posing as visitors snatched the 2,500-year-old gold torque of the Princess of Vix from a Burgundy museum.
Then last month, two masked men broke into the Renoir Museum at Cagnes-sur-Mer and stole four paintings in under three minutes, abandoning two in the garden as police arrived.
