(This is a translation of the original French version.)
“The imaginary museum abolishes distances.”
— André Malraux, The Voices of Silence, Gallimard, 1951
Seventy-five years ago, Malraux already glimpsed a space in which artworks would no longer depend on their material substance — a place where art would survive beyond its own tangibility.
In September 2025, UNESCO launched its Virtual Museum of Stolen Cultural Objects. Designed as an immersive and evolving digital platform, this virtual museum provides access to three-dimensional models of more than 250 stolen or missing cultural objects. More than an exhibition space, it is intended as a tool for awareness and transmission, meant to publicise UNESCO’s mission in the fight against illicit trafficking and to encourage any initiative likely to contribute to the protection, return or restitution of these works.
Born of imagination and technology, the three-dimensional models of these ghosts could help to combat effectively a circumstantial blindness still tolerated by certain players in the art market.
A virtual museum… or an imaginary one
Upon entering the site, one realises this is no ordinary interface. Conceived and staged by German-Burkinabé architect Francis Kéré as an immersive space, the site combines animation and music with navigation, in the manner of a video-game menu.
With a simple movement of the trackpad, one ascends a helicoidal structure reminiscent of the Great Ramp at New York’s Guggenheim or the scala del Bramante in the Vatican Museums.
A navigation tool then appears, equipped with numerous playful filters designed more for discovery than for research: by continent, by category of object, by date, by submitting country, by use, material, technique or even colour.
Here, no “Do not touch” sign. On the contrary: the visitor is invited to approach, to handle, to turn the works this way and that with their cursor.
Our visit opens with Caravaggio’s Nativity with Saint Lawrence and Saint Francis of Assisi, a canvas stolen in 1969 from the Oratory of San Lorenzo in Palermo, an event that caused considerable media uproar in Italy. Painted in 1609, this monumental canvas was the only surviving testimony of the artist’s brief Sicilian stay and held a central position above the altar, at the heart of the liturgical function of the place. Its disappearance not only deprives the history of art of a Baroque masterpiece emblematic of Caravaggio’s chiaroscuro: it also severs the bond between a work conceived for a specific space and the community that had given it meaning.
A little further on stands a stone tablet from the Al-Zahir Museum in Saudi Arabia, engraved in Musnad script. Dated to the pre-Islamic period (before the seventh century), it belongs to one of the oldest writing systems of southern Arabia, used in particular by the Sabaean, Himyarite, Ma’in and Qatabanian kingdoms. In the absence of an established transcription or translation, the inscription remains difficult to interpret; it is nonetheless a rare material witness to a language and to social practices now vanished.
Our virtual wandering finally leads us to the Samahongo mask, originating from north-western Zambia and associated with the Mukanda initiation ritual practised by the Mbunda communities. Carved in wood and adorned with feathers, this mask was used during the passage from childhood to adulthood. It belongs to a tradition of intergenerational transmission in which the object plays a role that is functional as much as symbolic. Removed from its ritual context, the mask loses its primary function and becomes an isolated fragment of a cultural system whose continuity it once ensured.
From contemplation to information
As one moves through the site, it quickly becomes apparent that the experience offered is not limited to the display of stolen works. Each object record, through the precision of its context, uses, provenance and the circumstances of its disappearance, shifts the visitor’s posture, inviting them to understand the mechanisms of illicit trafficking, its routes, its silences and its grey areas. The gaze is no longer confined to contemplation but tends towards engagement, however minimal, through the “share to protect it” option.
The intended audience thus extends well beyond art enthusiasts alone. The museum addresses students, researchers and institutions, but also those who participate, willingly or not, in the market: collectors, occasional buyers, intermediaries and seasoned professionals.
Could this be a new resource for art-market players? By making visible cultural goods long relegated to the margins of specialised databases or scattered across technical inventories, this database offers an additional tool for exercising the expected vigilance and documenting an increasingly demanding due diligence. This evolution does not occur in a vacuum: it comes precisely as the legal frameworks governing the international circulation of cultural property are tightening, and as requirements for traceability, documentation and proof of lawful origin are growing stronger (notably with Regulation (EU) 2019/880 on the introduction and the import of cultural goods, which establishes, depending on the categories concerned, a regime of prohibition, import licence or importer statement).
The stakes are decisive, for they alter the very economy of responsibility. When information becomes freely accessible, what yesterday amounted to a simple “I did not know” tends today towards a thornier question: could one reasonably not have known? Without turning UNESCO’s Virtual Museum into an autonomous normative source, its public availability could, in certain cases, contribute to redefining what is reasonably expected of a market participant when verifying, consulting or documenting matters before acquiring, importing or offering an artwork for sale.
Amateur and professional under Swiss law: from good faith to codified diligence
Under Swiss law, a private buyer is not subject to a general duty to verify the seller’s authority to dispose of the property. According to the settled case law of the Federal Supreme Court, a duty to inquire arises only in the presence of concrete indications capable of arousing suspicion (ATF 122 III 1, para. 2a/aa). Good faith is thus assessed in light of the degree of care that the circumstances objectively required of the purchaser (Art. 3 para. 2 CC; ATF 122 III 1, para. 2a; TF 5A_962/2017 of March 29, 2018, para. 5.1). The degree of diligence required depends on the specific situation, in particular the sector concerned and the purchaser’s familiarity with it (ATF 122 III 1, para. 2a/bb). The Federal Supreme Court has further clarified that, in sectors particularly exposed to the circulation of goods of dubious origin, such as the antiques trade, the due diligence requirements are heightened, even when the item is acquired for personal use and not for resale (ATF 122 III 1, para. 2a/bb).
While the amateur’s fate continues to be played out chiefly on the terrain of good faith, that of the professional follows a different logic. For art dealers and auction houses, diligence is no longer assessed only in concreto: it is the subject of a specific legal framework.
This framework rests primarily on the Cultural Property Transfer Act (CPTA), which entered into force in 2005 and notably implements the 1970 UNESCO Convention, as well as on its implementing ordinance (CPTO), a partial revision of which entered into force on 1 January 2026. Article 16 paragraph 1 CPTA lays down a clear principle: a cultural object may be transferred in the art trade or at auction only if the person transferring it can presume, in light of the circumstances, that it has not been stolen, removed from its owner against their will, derived from illicit excavations or unlawfully imported.
The law is not limited to a declaration of intent. It imposes concrete obligations, including the identification of the supplier or seller, obtaining a written declaration attesting to the right to dispose of the object, informing clients of import and export rules, keeping a register of acquisitions, and preserving relevant documents for thirty years. The Federal Office of Culture expressly recalls that the obligation to obtain from the seller or supplier a written declaration as to their right to dispose of a cultural object forms part of the special diligence duties applicable to the art trade and to auction sales.
But, concretely, what must a market professional consult today before purchasing a work? Beyond legal requirements stricto sensu, due diligence in practice also relies on professional standards and specialised tools. The Responsible Art Market Initiative (RAM) thus recommends, depending on the circumstances of the transaction, conducting targeted checks, while specifying that its guidelines are not intended to create new norms beyond existing legal obligations.
Foremost is INTERPOL’s database of stolen works of art, which gathers descriptions and photographs of nearly 57,000 objects and constitutes, according to INTERPOL, the only international register containing certified police information on stolen or missing works. It is complemented by the ID-Art mobile application, available free of charge, which allows these data to be consulted in the field.
Then come the ICOM Red Lists, which play an essential awareness role: they do not list objects actually stolen, but illustrate the categories of cultural property most vulnerable to illicit trafficking, in order to help authorities, institutions and market players identify objects at risk.
The art market also relies on private databases such as the Art Loss Register (ALR), presented by its operator as the world’s largest private database of lost, stolen and looted works of art, antiques and collectibles, with more than 700,000 records. For high-value works or uncertain provenances, this type of tool has established itself as a classic component of due diligence.
These instruments do not replace the legal assessment required by the CPTA, but they now constitute its practical extension. As information becomes more accessible, more structured and more easily verifiable, it becomes harder for a professional to maintain that they did not know what they could reasonably have discovered.
Towards an evolution of due diligence?
At this stage, UNESCO’s Virtual Museum creates no new legal obligations — and that is not its primary purpose. But it could profoundly modify the way due diligence is exercised. Given how extremely simple it is to access and to use, can one reasonably omit to consult it? In our view, if UNESCO continues to enrich its virtual museum and adds more suitable search functions, it could soon become one of the essential tools in the fight against the illicit trafficking of cultural property.
Malraux’s imaginary museum abolished the distances between artworks; UNESCO’s virtual museum may well abolish another distance — the one that, too often still, allowed eyes to remain closed.