As Sicilians Flocked to a Religious Festival, Thieves Broke Into a Nearby Museum and Stole Four Renaissance Paintings

Tens of thousands of people marched through the streets of Messina, in Italy’s Sicily region, this past weekend for the Procession of the Vara, an annual religious festival featuring floats and fanfare. As they celebrated, something sinister unfolded behind closed doors: a museum heist. Using the large crowds as a distraction, an unknown number of thieves slipped into the Regional Museum of Messina without tripping any alarms.

Once inside, they targeted Antonello da Messina’s Polyptych of San Gregorio, a 1473 altarpiece depicting the Virgin Mary and Jesus, flanked by saints on either side. The thieves removed the artwork’s five surviving panels and escaped with three. The other two were found leaning against a fence outside, perhaps abandoned in the rush to escape.

A small devotional painting by Antonello, depicting the Madonna and Child with a Franciscan monk on one side and an adult Christ on the other, was also stolen, with the criminals smashing a display case to access it. All we can do now is hope they are recovered as soon as possible.” This isn’t the altarpiece’s first brush with destruction. It originally consisted of six panels, but one was destroyed in the 1908 earthquake that devastated Sicily and killed more than 40 percent of Messina’s population at the time.

Around 40 works by Antonello are known to survive today. The artist is regarded as one of the most important southern Italian painters of the Renaissance. His importance to Messina is undeniable.

Antonello has long been credited with introducing Flemish oil painting techniques and influences to Italy, although more recent research disputes this narrative. He was probably trained in Naples, where works by Netherlandish painters including Jan van Eyck and Rogier van der Weyden would have been available for study. Oil painting during the Renaissance Oil paint allowed artists to build up extremely thin layers of translucent color, producing details and textures—skin, hair, jewels, fabric and reflections—that were harder to achieve with traditional tempera.

The artist “made a crucial contribution to the Renaissance by unifying two very important aspects of Renaissance art: the work of Flemish artists and Italian art,” art historian Grazia Musolino tells the Times. The stolen polyptych panels and double-sided devotional painting were the only works by Antonello that remained on display in his native city. The altarpiece, painted six years before the artist’s death in 1479, had never left Messina before.