Nearly 100 pieces of priceless 18th-century jewelry were stolen from Germany’s renowned Green Vault last Monday in what may be among the most audacious and damaging heists in history. According to police, thieves entered the Royal Castle of Dresden before dawn through a window and used an ax to break into a fortified display case. They absconded with three sets of Baroque jewelry within minutes.
The treasure is now stolen history. The thieves took “objects of immeasurable cultural value,” said Dirk Syndram, a German art historian and the vault’s director. The site plundered was one of the grandest treasure chambers in Europe. The Grünes Gewölbe, as it is known in Germany, is the jewel of Saxony, built nearly three centuries ago by Augustus the Strong, king of Poland and elector of Saxony.
Augustus II, known in Saxony as Frederick Augustus I, was a fascinating character of rapacious appetites. He stood almost 5’10″ (a towering height for the 1700s) and was known for his tremendous physical strength, which he was fond of showing off. His sobriquet, “the Strong,” was earned with feats of strength, such as reputedly breaking horseshoes with his bare hands. He was also a lifelong womanizer and his fertility was legendary. He was rumored to have fathered more than 300 children, which, understandably, added to the heroic myth surrounding him.
Yet he is most celebrated as the father of Saxony’s art, culture, and lavish architecture. He built opulent baroque palaces and buildings in his capital city, Dresden, and elsewhere in Saxony. Augustus gathered artists and musicians and systematically collected art and commissioned jewelry. He succeeded in elevating Dresden to a major cultural center of Europe.
In 1723, toward the end of his reign, Augustus set to work turning the private treasure chamber of his royal palace into a public museum. And it is this that would become the Green Vault. He ordered its extravagant renovation and had its chamber expanded into the grand eight-room design to display all of his accumulated art and wealth.
Augustus’s transformation of the Green Vault into a public museum, filled contemporaneously with royal crown jewels and other inherited riches, was a groundbreaking development. It’s depletion by thieves is a tragedy. “There’s nothing like it in the world, in one place,” jewelry historian Vivienne Becker told the Wall Street Journal. “It was the symbol of man’s highest achievement at that age. It is very much more than jewelry.”
