The Leonardo Da Vinci masterpiece Madonna With The Yarnwinder looks the last word in piety. The 16th-century oil-on-canvas portrait depicts the Virgin Mary watching over the infant Jesus, who clings to a wooden tool used for winding wool said to symbolise Christ's crucifixion.
In August, however, the masterpiece, worth at least GBP25 million (HK$321 million) on the open market, fell prey to vice. Thieves posing as visitors joined a tour of Drumlanrig Castle in Scotland, the home of the painting's proprietor, Britain's biggest private landowner, the Duke of Buccleuch.
The thieves hovered at the staircase where the painting was displayed and at 11am they overpowered a guide at knifepoint, disabled the alarm system, lifted the painting from a wall and fled. The Daily Mirror quoted the Duke of Buccleuch's son, the Earl of Dalkeith, as saying his father was 'distressed and disgusted - he cares passionately about this particular picture'.
The insurers, Lloyds underwriters, is offering a reward of GBP100,000 for the recovery of the masterpiece, which the Scotsman likened to the Mona Lisa. Ossian Ward of Art Review Magazine said the culprits were probably just a 'bunch of chancers'.
Enter one of the art world's most colourful figures, Jonathan Tokeley-Parry: a former cavalry officer with a Cambridge philosophy degree who turned his hand to smuggling art. In a letter to Britain's Daily Telegraph newspaper, Mr Tokeley-Parry provocatively contested that in fact the thieves were probably quite the opposite of chancers. 'They strike me as intelligent, efficient,' he wrote.
During his smuggling heyday, Mr Tokeley-Parry boasted of his James Bond-style exploits and called himself '003'. The tomb raider, who dipped Egyptian artefacts in plastic to make them look like cheap souvenirs so he could take them out of the country easily, originally aroused suspicion in 1994 when his assistant took 27 papyrus texts to the British Museum to confirm their authenticity. In 1997, after his arrest and a failed suicide attempt, Mr Tokeley-Parry was convicted of smuggling major artefacts, including the stone head of the 18th-dynasty pharaoh Amenhotep III sold to a 'person in London' for US$1.2 million. Mr Tokeley-Parry served three years of a six-year prison term and was released in 2000.