Four of the most important works of art by the 15th-century Renaissance master Antonello da Messina were stolen during a national holiday from a museum in the Sicilian port city of Messina.
According to The Guardian, thieves gained access to the Regional Museum of Messina, or MuMe, on Saturday evening, possibly capitalising on attention being focused on La Vara, a huge religious festival that takes place in the city on 15 August, when Italy marks the Ferragosto national holiday.
Bypassing the alarm systems, the gang broke into a security display box and stole four wood panels painted by Antonello, who is widely credited with changing the course of Renaissance art.
Thieves took three of the five surviving panels that made up an altarpiece known as the Polittico di San Gregorio, one of the Sicilian painter’s most important works.
Museum director breaks silence on art heist
Marisa Mercurio, the director of the museum, sad, “It is an extremely serious and significant loss. They have stolen works of enormous cultural, artistic and symbolic importance, not only for Messina but for Sicily as a whole. All we can do now is hope they are recovered as soon as possible.”
Originally composed of six panels created for the Monastero di San Gregorio, which was destroyed in the 1908 Messina earthquake, the altarpiece was the only work by the Sicilian painter never to have left his home city.
A fourth work was taken from a secure display case: a small double-sided painting depicting the Virgin and Child with a Franciscan monk on one side and Christ on the other.
The painting had belonged to the Wilhelm Soldan collection and was sold by Christie’s to the Sicilian regional government in 2003, the year it was attributed to Antonello.
The haul could have been even greater: six paintings were stolen in total, but, inexplicably, two of the panels were abandoned on a low wall outside the museum.
