French Authorities Investigate Sale of Notre Dame Stained Glass by Sotheby’s After a Heritage Group Alleges It Was Stolen

French authorities are investigating a sale by Sotheby’s auction house of a pair of stained glass that one heritage group claims were stolen from Paris’s Notre Dame cathedral in 1862.

The auction house offered the precious polychrome glass roundels, one of which features an angel holding a candle and the other an angel with an incense burner, in 2015. They sold separately with one fetching €123,000 ($132,000) and the other €111,000 ($119,000), trumping their high estimates of €60,000 ($64,000).

The catalogue notes acknowledged that, made in around 1250 and roughly 16 inches in diameter, the pieces had once been part of the monumental rose window of the cathedral’s northern transept, but were dismantled and replaced by the architect Eugène Viollet-le-Duc when he restored the building. The provenance showed that the pieces were later sold by the stained glass restorer Edouard Didron sometime between 1877 and 1905.

Now, the legitimacy of that 2015 sale is being called into question. French police have launched an initial probe into a legal complaint filed Monday, September 11, by the French association Lumiere sur le Patrimoine (Spotlight on Heritage), which investigates the sales of heritage objects that it suspects may have been stolen.

It alleges that the glass roundels were never Viollet-le-Duc’s to sell because anything taken from the cathedral automatically belongs to France. The Lumiere sur le Patrimoine was set up earlier this year by its chair Philippe Machicote after he became aware of the 2015 sale while looking through old auction catalogues. He founded the association after he contacted France’s ministry of culture to share his concerns, but did not receive “a real response.”

“At that date [1877–1905], the cathedral belonged to the state, and had since the revolution,” he told . “Anything taken from it in the 19th century was imprescriptible and inalienable. The situation is ludicrous.” He described the works as being “hidden in a sale of old paintings, sculptures, and drawings.”

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