The art that exists is a tiny fraction of the art that is lost. Vanished works outnumber the surviving masterpieces in museums, just as the dead outnumber the living. Where are the paintings of Apelles, court artist to Alexander the Great, who was said to be the greatest artist of all time? Gone forever. Not a fragment of any of his paintings survives. Meanwhile, the reputation of Gustav Klimt is forever scarred by the destruction of some of his most serious works at the end of the second world war.

Lost art exerts a fascination all of its own. Like ghostly mutterings in galleries, the images of vanished works linger behind the surviving corpus of art. Ghosts of Leonardo da Vinci's Battle of Anghiari haunt Salvador Dali's painting Spain. Holbein's destroyed Whitehall mural is commemorated by his eerie full-size drawing of Henry VIII.

In the 20th century, art's relationship with disappearance got stranger than ever. Some artists made works that were designed to disappear – Robert Smithson's Spiral Jetty sank into the landscape before re-emerging in recent years. For me, the most moving lost masterpiece of the last couple of decades is Rachel Whiteread's House: a work that was not specifically intended to disappear although it had no permission to permanently exist, either.

Whiteread cast the interior of an entire house that was due to be demolished: the resulting grey spectre of a London home stood isolated in a park and radiated negative ions of surreal beauty. Lives and memories, the history of a city were held in this powerful monument. The demolition of House by a hostile local council who refused to accept its artistic and cultural importance seems, now, tragic. It did away at a stroke with the most serious and worthwhile work of the "Young British Art" generation.

It hurts to lose art. Lucian Freud never gave up looking for a portrait of Francis Bacon by him that was stolen in Berlin. He made a compelling Wanted poster appealing for its return – Freud's only work of conceptual art. The loss was evidently painful: the painting was an intimate record of his friend and equal, and eerily vanished from Berlin, where Freud had spent his early years. Berlin was his lost city.

Lost art is fascinating because it epitomises everything else that is lost, as well. The miracle of its occasional recovery is an image of redemption.