Problem was, this was long before the Instagram era, when we can watch our images disseminate to the entire world with the flick of a finger. On his return to London, Capa handed his precious rolls of film over to staff members at Life magazine for developing. Said staff members then shrugged and handed the duty off to 15-year-old lab assistant Dennis Banks, who, in the time-honored tradition of 15-year-olds throughout history, fucked everything up instantly.

Robert Capa

Upon hanging the film to dry, Banks was practically shitting himself at how utterly soul-crushing the photographs were. But then -- perhaps due to his excitement, but probably more because editors were incessantly screaming deadlines at him -- he cranked the heat up too far in an attempt to dry them faster. Of the four rolls of film that Capa had gone to hell and back to capture, Banks melted three and a half of them.

Ironically, the heat damage done to the surviving 11 photos is what lent them the blurry, otherworldly quality that is part of what makes them so memorable to this day. So if you're the generous type, you could say that Banks did the world a favor by utterly destroying 90 percent of history's hardest-earned photographs.

Robert Capa

As a result, the world was left with a blank piece of paper that was once owned by Leonardo da Vinci, for whatever that's worth. But Italian historian Carlo Pedretti is still hopeful that the sketch can one day be recovered using hi-tech chemicals or nuclear procedures. We are equally optimistic, if for no other reason than that we never realized blasting a piece of paper with white-hot radiation was a tool in the art historian utility belt.

Gastrell wasn't done yet, however. The town's insistence that Gastrell continue to pay taxes on the property even though he'd been run out of it like a Victorian monster understandably pissed him off, leading him to conclude that if he couldn't enjoy the home he'd bought and was still being forced to pay for, then nobody goddamn would. Three years after the tree debacle, Gastrell had New Place razed to the freaking ground. Today, not much remains of it beyond the remnants of a foundation and a single shitty napkin sketch of how it once stood.

George Vertue

It was commissioned for Churchill's 80th birthday and done by Graham Sutherland, official World War II artist (which is about as badass a title as any artist can hope to achieve). Sutherland, whose works today easily command hundreds of thousands of dollars, chose to depict Churchill as he truly appeared, instead of how he wished to appear ... and Churchill downright despised it. When the portrait was unveiled at a Westminster Hall ceremony before both Houses of Parliament, Churchill derided it as "a remarkable example of modern art," to thunderous laughter from those in attendance -- despite the fact that they were the ones who'd commissioned it in the first place.

Thereby proving that they knew what was good for them.

Rather than being hung in the Palace of Westminster as intended, after the ceremony, the portrait was whisked to Churchill's country estate and locked away in a cellar, never to be seen again. But surely, someone must have stumbled across it in the intervening years and returned it to its rightful place of honor, right? Not a chance, thanks to a certain Lady Churchill.

See, after Churchill's death, his widow Clementine conspired with her private secretary, Grace Hamblin, to rid the world of the much-hated portrait once and for all. Hamblin recruited her hulky brother to lug the massive painting to his van, drive it to his house several miles away, and burn it in his backyard. So now, rather than an honest portrait of an octogenarian who'd weathered decades of Nazi blitzkriegs and multiple strokes, we're left only with the images of an angry British man packing a face full of scowl. Which is exactly how Churchill wanted it.

Back in late 2012, a gang of Romanian art thieves entered Rotterdam's Kunsthal gallery and hauled away seven paintings by Picasso, Monet, Gauguin, Matisse, and Lucian Freud -- names that may as well be written entirely in dollar signs like they're '90s rappers, because the combined worth of the collection was estimated to be somewhere in the nine-figure range.

Pablo Picasso

But while the heist itself was surprisingly simple (three men, led by Radu Dogaru, literally walked into the museum and back out with the paintings), finding a buyer for priceless, obviously stolen artwork isn't. When no patron with a sufficiently bulky bank account proved willing to touch the paintings with a ten-foot pole, Dogaru gave them to his mom, who buried them in a cemetery in the small Romanian village of Caracliu, because that's apparently what you do with paintings when you want to keep them safe.

Dogaru and Co. were arrested for the heist based on security footage, but prosecutors were missing a key piece of evidence: the stolen (and subsequently buried) paintings. Mama Dogaru soon became nervous for her overly art-appreciating boy when the authorities came a-knockin' in search of said evidence. Risking a severe haunting, she went out to the graveyard, dug the paintings back up, and burned them in her oven.

Henri Matisse

Or at least, that's what she claimed at first. In an obvious bid to reciprocate her over-protectiveness, it seems Radu convinced Mama Dogaru to recant her story. She later claimed that she hadn't torched the paintings after all. But forensic experts analyzing the contents of her oven found the remnants of pigments consistent with those used in the stolen paintings. (Read: deadly poisons that artists historically painted with, because 19th-century painters didn't give one hammered shit about anything.) Dogaru presumably then claimed that those came from the other, totally-not-stolen artwork that his mom burns on the regular, because the secret ingredient that lends her pies their signature flaky crust is the ceaseless wailing of the art-loving world.

J. Olasz is an aspiring writer, has an actual book which you may like, and has created gaming modules, a Lego webcomic, and of course has a Twitter.

For more impressive failures of humanity, check out 6 Natural Disasters That Were Caused by Human Stupidity and 8 Terrifying Animal Swarms Created by Human Stupidity.

Subscribe to our YouTube channel, and check out 5 People Who Need to Put Down Their F#@%ing Camera, and other videos you won't see on the site!

Also, follow us on Facebook, and never trust interns.