Discover the true story of the real stolen paintings in Berlin Season 2, The Lady with an Ermine, and the psychological meaning of Alvaro’s collection.
There is so much poetry and romance in the second season of Berlin. There is the unconditional love of Bruce toward Kayla, but also her doubts and the unexpected infatuation for another man. There is the interrupted story between Roi and Cameron, with the underlying feelings still existing but impossible to fully express. There is the protagonist Berlin, who ends up falling in love with his new flame Candela, and his right-hand man Damiàn, who ends up planning an escape with the Duchess of Malaga. More than a series about a spectacular robbery, Berlin: The Lady with an Ermine is a showcase of intertwining human emotions.
And above all this, the show’s plot connects us with art in a surprisingly intense way. Yes, this time the heist of Berlin’s crew is inspired by the request of Álvaro Hermoso de Medina, Duke of Malaga with a particular passion for art, to the point of having become over the years the owner of an incredible series of famous paintings stolen from museums all over the world. The moment when Berlin and the others penetrate into Duke Alvaro’s secret underground vault and discover that collection of masterpieces plundered over the years represents a shock for the protagonist: as a true art lover, Berlin sees that collection as an insult to the beauty that the world deserves.
The writers of Berlin did a great job of research for that collection, because those are all paintings that were really stolen and that, at the time of the show’s release, are effectively lost: there is a true story behind each of the stolen paintings we see in Berlin: The Lady with an Ermine, and the fact of seeing them in the private collection of a criminal is less absurd than one might think.
The true stories of the stolen paintings in Berlin: The Lady with an Ermine
When Berlin penetrates Duke Alvaro’s security systems, he finds himself inside a true paradise for art lovers: all the most famous paintings stolen from museums over the years are there, right before his eyes. Berlin immediately recognizes five of them, briefly mentioning their history, but others can be identified, equally famous even though Berlin does not speak of them. All paintings stolen for real in the real world and never found again.
These are the five paintings on which Berlin’s attention focuses in episode 3 of the second season:
Caravaggio – Nativity with St. Francis and St. Lawrence
Painted in 1609, this masterpiece is legendary for Caravaggio’s signature use of deep, dramatic shadows and raw, human realism. In October 1969, thieves entered the Oratory of San Lorenzo in Palermo, Sicily, and cut the massive canvas cleanly out of its frame. The heist immediately became tied to the Sicilian Mafia, and decades of underworld myths suggest the painting was hidden in barns, used as a mob boss’s bedside rug, or even tragically destroyed. Today, this ghost of art history carries a rough valuation of around $20 million, remaining one of the most heavily hunted crimes on the FBI’s art theft list.
Vincent van Gogh – Poppy Flowers
Poppy Flowers captures a pivotal moment in Van Gogh’s career when his style shifted heavily toward intense color and light. Its history reads like an improbable thriller, having been stolen from Cairo’s Mohamed Mahmoud Khalil Museum not once, but twice. First taken in 1977 and later recovered, it vanished for a second time in broad daylight in August 2010 when thieves cut it cleanly from its frame, exposing a museum security system where almost none of the alarms or cameras were actually working. Today it has a valuation estimated at over $50 million.
Rembrandt – The Storm on the Sea of Galilee
It’s Rembrandt’s only known seascape, capturing a terrifying biblical storm with a masterclass in contrasting light and shadow. As Berlin explains, its disappearance is the centerpiece of the infamous 1990 Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum heist in Boston. Two thieves disguised as police officers gained entry into the museum at midnight, tied up the security guards, and brutally cut the massive canvas straight out of its frame. With an estimated value of over $100 million, its empty wooden frame still hangs on the museum wall today as a somber placeholder for a masterpiece lost to the underworld.
Paul Cézanne – View from Auvers-sur-Oise
This landscape painting, created around 1880, is highly celebrated as a crucial transitional piece that marks Cézanne’s evolution into his mature style, featuring the structural brushwork that eventually paved the way for modern Cubism. Its theft on Millennium Night—December 31, 1999—reads like a script directly from a Hollywood heist: while the city of Oxford was distracted by the roaring noise and smoke of New Year’s Eve fireworks, a lone thief broke through the glass skylight of the Ashmolean Museum, dropped down a rope ladder, and detonated a smoke bomb. Using a small fan to spread the smokescreen and blind both the guards and security cameras, the burglar snatched the canvas and vanished in less than ten minutes. Valued at roughly $5 million today, it was the only artwork taken from a room full of masterpieces, leaving investigators to believe it was stolen strictly to order for a shadowy private collector.
Amedeo Modigliani – Woman with a Fan
Painted in 1919, just a year before the artist’s tragic death, this melancholic portrait is a supreme example of Modigliani’s signature style, defined by elongated forms, almond-shaped eyes, and a striking, elegant geometry. Its theft in May 2010 was part of the infamous “Spider-Man of Paris” heist at the Musée d’Art Moderne: a highly skilled cat burglar named Vjeran Tomic scaled the building, slipped through a window, and took advantage of a faulty motion detector system to steal five masterpieces in total silence. In a bizarre and frustrating twist, a panicked accomplice later claimed he threw the canvas into a commercial garbage compactor out of fear of being caught. Valued at roughly $25 million, international investigators remain highly skeptical of that story, holding onto the hope that this hauntingly beautiful face is still intact, hidden away in a private gallery.
Amidst these five paintings before which Berlin stops, there are others that the most attentive viewers might have identified:
Édouard Manet – Chez Tortoni
Painted around 1875, this elegant artwork is a premier example of Manet’s Impressionist depictions of Parisian café society, focusing on a gentleman in a black top hat sketching at a table. It was stolen together with Rembrandt’s Storm on the Sea of Galilee during the same 1990 Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum heist in Boston: the thieves pulled it from its frame and left the empty wood sitting directly on the chair of the museum’s security director. Valued at roughly $30 million, this portrait remains an enigmatic missing puzzle piece of that fateful night.
Jan van Eyck – The Just Judges
Completed around 1432, this detailed panel is a vital component of the Ghent Altarpiece, celebrated as one of the foundational masterpieces of the Northern Renaissance. It vanished on the night of April 10, 1934, from the Saint Bavo Cathedral in Ghent, Belgium, leaving behind a bizarre ransom note demanding one million Belgian francs. Months later, a local stockbroker confessed on his deathbed to orchestrating the heist, but he passed away before revealing where he had hidden it. While the entire altarpiece is considered virtually priceless, this single missing panel is valued in the tens of millions of dollars, with a modern replica currently filling its empty space in the cathedral.
Raphael – Portrait of a Young Man
Created around 1513 during the peak of the Italian High Renaissance, this masterful painting is widely believed by scholars to be a self-portrait of Raphael himself. Its fame is tragic: it is universally regarded by historians as the most important and valuable painting to have gone missing since World War II. In September 1939, as Nazi forces invaded Poland, the painting was hidden inside a walled-up outbuilding, just alongside Leonardo Da Vinci’s The Lady with an Ermine. Discovered by the Gestapo, it was seized to become part of the private collection of Hans Frank, the Nazi Governor-General.
While the Da Vinci was recovered after the war, Raphael’s masterpiece vanished entirely during the German retreat in 1945. If it were to resurface today, its value is estimated to easily exceed $100 million, making its hidden inclusion in the show a brilliant tribute to art history’s greatest unsolved mystery.
Johannes Vermeer – The Concert
Painted around 1664, this intimate masterpiece is one of only about 34 surviving works by Vermeer, capturing a quiet, beautifully lit domestic scene of three musicians lost in their art. It vanished during the exact same 1990 Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum heist in Boston alongside the works of Rembrandt and Manet, when two thieves dressed as police officers sliced the canvas cleanly out of its frame. Because Vermeer works are so incredibly rare, The Concert carries a staggering valuation of over $250 million, earning it the tragic title of the single most valuable unrecovered stolen painting in human history.
Diego Velázquez – The Hand with a Letter
Painted around 1630 by the master of the Spanish Baroque, Diego Velázquez, this work carries a unique, double-layered history of tragedy and crime. It is not a complete canvas, but a fragment of the Portrait of Archbishop Fernando de Valdés saved from the catastrophic 1734 fire that destroyed Madrid’s Real Alcázar palace. For centuries, this surviving piece—a hauntingly isolated hand holding a document bearing Velázquez’s actual, distinct signature—was safely kept in the Spanish Royal Collection. However, in August 1989, it became the target of an audacious inside-job heist at the Palacio Real de Madrid, where it was stolen from a restricted area and vanished into the black market. It remains unrecovered to this day.
Édouard Manet – Singer at a Café-Concert
Painted in 1879, this vibrant depiction of Parisian nightlife introduces a brilliant twist to Duke Alvaro’s vault: unlike the rest of his hoard, this painting wasn’t stolen. In the real world, Manet’s Singer at a Café-Concert was legally bought at a Christie’s auction in 2006 for a staggering £1,352,000, and its current whereabouts are listed by historians simply as “unknown.” By including it, the show reveals that Alvaro operates just as comfortably in elite auction houses as he does in the criminal underworld.
Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot – The Road from Sèvres
Painted in 1865, Le chemin de Sèvres holds a notorious title in real-world art crime history: it remains the most valuable painting stolen from the Louvre since the Mona Lisa was taken in 1911. On Sunday, May 3, 1998, a thief took advantage of the heavy afternoon crowds packing the Parisian museum. The criminal simply slipped behind the painting, deftly removed the mounting pegs holding it to the frame, and walked out undetected into the street. Because the canvas is remarkably small—measuring just 29 by 34 centimeters—it was easily hidden away in an ordinary bag before guards realized the wall was empty. Its estimated value today sits well over $2.6 million. Despite an immediate lockdown of the museum and an intensive police investigation, the masterpiece has never been found.
Claude Monet – Marina
This impressionist masterpiece was stolen during one of the most audacious armed robberies in South American history on February 24, 2006, at the Chácara do Céu Museum in Rio de Janeiro. Taking advantage of the chaotic, booming crowds of the annual Carnival parade passing right outside the gates, four armed men stormed the museum, cut the security wires, and terrorized the staff. They vanished into the festive streets with a haul that included works by Picasso, Dalí, and Matisse, alongside Monet’s seaside landscape. While its value at the time was immense, a Monet of this caliber on today’s open market would comfortably command an estimated value of $10 million to $15 million. Despite international alerts, the painting remains completely lost to the underworld.
Anonymous – Vanitas (Still Life with Books, a Globe, a Skull, a Violin, and a Fan)
This specific canvas, heavily attributed to a student of the legendary Jan Davidsz. de Heem, was the centerpiece of a violent, legendary true-crime story known as the Skylight Caper at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts on Labor Day weekend in 1972. In the dead of night, three armed, masked thieves scaled a tree, slipped through a deactivated skylight using nylon ropes, and ambushed the guards with sawed-off shotguns. They escaped into the night with a massive cache of jewelry and 18 priceless paintings. Its modern valuation is estimated between $1.5 million and $2.5 million.
Claude Monet – Gennevilliers Plain
Painted by Monet in 1877 and originally purchased directly by his close friend, patron, and fellow artist Gustave Caillebotte, the vibrant landscape remained safely within the Caillebotte family collection for generations before eventually passing through prestigious auction houses like Sotheby’s and Christie’s. Much like Manet’s The Singer at a Café-Concert, this masterpiece was never actually stolen, but rather purchased legally by Alvaro at an auction. Today, its market value sits around $1.5 million.
There is no doubt: it truly seems that Duke Alvaro of Berlin Season 2 has managed to lay his hands upon every stolen masterpiece in human history.
Why does Duke Alvaro want the Lady with an Ermine? The crown jewel of an empire of stolen works
Within the logic of Duke Alvaro’s secret vault, Leonardo da Vinci’s The Lady with an Ermine is not simply another painting to be added to a dark room. For a billionaire collector who has already succeeded in hiding works by Rembrandt, Caravaggio, and Vermeer, this single masterpiece represents something completely different: it is the supreme emblem of absolute power and total control.
Duke Alvaro does not collect art only because he appreciates its beauty; he collects it because he craves the status deriving from possessing what is entirely inaccessible to the rest of the world, and being the only person on earth able to see it live. In this context, The Lady with an Ermine shapes up to be the absolute crown jewel, also because it has already been the subject of a theft of historic proportions: in 1939, the canvas was famously plundered by the Nazis, with the Governor-General of occupied Poland keeping it as a personal trophy in his private office, until the Allies recovered it in 1945.
By transforming this masterpiece into Alvaro’s ultimate forbidden desire, the series beautifully echoes that dark legacy, rendering Leonardo’s canvas the quintessential symbol of a powerful man’s obsession to make his own what belongs to the entire world. To this must be added the artistic meaning of that painting: a young woman caught in the web of court politics, clutching a white ermine, an animal that traditionally embodies purity and moderation. For a criminal collector like Alvaro, possessing this painting means capturing the very essence of a pure and elusive elegance, only to shut it away in a cage.
The ending of Berlin Season 2 and the true story of the auction sale of the Lady with an Ermine
The second season of Berlin ends with the usual, unexpected twist: at the altar, while Berlin marries Candela, he confesses to her that the true Lady with an Ermine is actually still in his hands. But not for long: soon there would be an auction in which the painting will be sold for a surprisingly low price.
As the closing credits of the series explain, this part of the story is true: in 2016, The Lady with an Ermine changed hands, moving from being part of the private collection of the Czartoryski family to becoming official property of Poland, to be exhibited in a museum. The painting was valued at at least 350 million dollars, but it was sold for just over one hundred million, a fact that caused an uproar across the entire world and pushed the entire leadership of the Czartoryski Foundation to resign in protest. Based on the declarations of the leaders who submitted their resignations, Prince Czartoryski bypassed the foundation’s ethics by striking an agreement with the Polish government at a completely out-of-market price. The prince would later justify his decision as a precise desire to facilitate the deal, a gesture akin to a donation through a prominent discount.
Within the dynamics of the Netflix series, the sale of The Lady with an Ermine at a low price serves as yet another testament to the high value that art holds in Berlin’s philosophy of life: a passionate thief who had already returned to museums all the paintings stolen from Duke Alvaro and who, at the moment of the auction, voluntarily decides not to profit too heavily from beauty, choosing to let a masterpiece like Leonardo Da Vinci’s become available to the world once more without driving a hard bargain on the price.
The meaning of art for Berlin
When Berlin sees Duke Alvaro’s private collection for the first time, with all the most important stolen masterpieces under the same roof, he is first overwhelmed by the beauty, but immediately afterward comes indignation: Berlin instantly hates Alvaro’s selfishness, which decides to preclude the entire world from the beauty that mankind manages to achieve through artistic production, solely for his personal enjoyment.
From that moment on, a true duel of dignity unfolds between Berlin and Alvaro. For Berlin, art helps humanity remain anchored to the right values, and it is an unpardonable crime to deprive mankind of this possibility. This is why the protagonist will lead Duke Alvaro to his downfall, stealing from him the things he holds most dear and leaving him with a forged copy of the Lady with an Ermine, while the rest of the masterpieces that had been in his underground vault return to their rightful owners. A gift that Berlin gives to humanity, now that he is up by a few tens of millions of dollars stolen, once again, from Alvaro.
Even for a criminal like Berlin, who has built an entire lifestyle upon thefts and money, there are things that cannot be stolen, sold, or quantified in monetary terms: for him, art is a heritage of humanity of inestimable value.
Frequently Asked Questions
Yes. The vast majority of the masterpieces shown or mentioned in Duke Alvaro’s secret collection—including works by Rembrandt, Caravaggio, Jan van Eyck (The Just Judges), and Vermeer (The Concert)—are real-world artworks that were stolen in infamous heists and, in many cases, remain missing to this day.
The finale directly references a major real-world controversy from December 2016. The private Czartoryski collection, which included Leonardo da Vinci’s The Lady with an Ermine, was sold to the Polish government for a suspiciously low price of €100 million (around $105 million), despite being valued by experts at over $300 million. The sale caused a massive scandal, leading to the immediate resignation of the Czartoryski Foundation’s board in protest.
For Duke Alvaro, the painting is his ultimate “forbidden wish.” As a billionaire who already possesses some of the world’s greatest stolen art, owning the Da Vinci masterpiece represents absolute power and exclusivity. Ironically, his obsession mirrors the painting’s dark real-world history, as it was famously looted by the Nazis in 1939 to serve as a private trophy for Germany’s Governor-General in occupied Poland.
Instead of keeping or selling the priceless collection, Berlin chooses to anonymously return all the stolen masterpieces to their rightful museums. This act highlights the fundamental psychological difference between Berlin and Alvaro: while the billionaire wants to hoard beauty in the dark for personal status, Berlin views art as a priceless heritage belonging to all of humanity.
Eagle-eyed viewers can spot several legendary art-history phantoms, most notably Raphael’s Portrait of a Young Man (stolen by the Nazis alongside the Da Vinci and still missing today) and Johannes Vermeer’s The Concert (stolen during the notorious 1990 Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum heist). The other paintings are listed above in this article.
