The Royal Castle in Warsaw

This guide to the Royal Castle in Warsaw follows twenty-two paintings stolen three separate times over more than a century, by Napoleon in 1807, by Tsar Nicholas I in 1832, and by the Nazis in 1939. It traces their painter, Bernardo Bellotto, a Venetian hired by Poland's last king to record Warsaw street by street in the 1770s, and the castle's own destruction after the 1944 Warsaw Uprising, when German demolition squads packed it room by room with explosives. Museum curators, meanwhile, were already working to get artworks out of the building before the walls came down.