Renaissance Masterpieces Stolen from Sicilian Museum During National Holiday

Thieves have dealt a Sicilian museum a harrowing loss, stealing three of the five surviving devotional panels painted by Renaissance master Antonello da Messina.

The assailants broke into the Regional Museum of Messina, also known as MuMem, on Saturday evening, as the port city celebrated the Ferragosto national holiday. Evading the museum’s security system, they took three wood panels that once composed a six-piece altarpiece known as the Polittico di San Gregorio, a seminal work within da Messina’s oeuvre and art history. A fourth, smaller work, depicting the Virgin and Child attended by a Franciscan monk on one side and Christ on the other, was also taken.

“It is an extremely serious and significant loss,” Marisa Mercurio, the director of the museum, told the Guardian. “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.”

Authorities found two of the five altarpiece panels abandoned against a wall outside the museum. 

The Polittico di San Gregorio was created for the Monastero di San Gregorio, which was destroyed in the 1908 Messina earthquake. It is the only work by the painter still held by his home city. Christie’s sold the double-sided painting to the Sicilian regional government in 2003, during the Wilhelm Soldan collection auction, shortly after its attribution to Antonello.

Born sometime in 1430, Antonello is credited as the key link between the northern and southern Renaissance schools, with a distinct signature shaped by his studies of Provençal and Flemish artists, including Jan van Eyck. According to contemporary sources, the Flemish master painter taught him delicate oil-painting techniques to produce the soft, inner glow that defined van Eyck’s own famed canvases and that had yet to be employed in Italy.

In February, the Italian government acquired a prized Antonello portrait at Sotheby’s in New York for $14.9 million. Titled Ecco Homo, the oil painting features the piercing gaze of a man dramatically lit with gold light against a black background. Italian Culture Minister Alessandro Giuli hailed its return to Italy as, “a historic moment” and “an unprecedented cultural operation.”

“The overnight theft is a wound inflicted on the historical memory and cultural identity of the city of Messina,” Mercurio said. “These were works that had survived the earthquake, destruction and five centuries of history. To see them taken from the public in this way makes the loss impossible to measure in purely economic terms.”