The Messina museum heist unfolded as tens of thousands gathered in the Sicilian port city for the Procession of the Vara, an annual religious celebration of floats and pageantry. While crowds filled the streets, thieves slipped into the Regional Museum of Messina without triggering alarms and targeted key works by Renaissance master Antonello da Messina, according to officials.
Using the festival’s distraction, the intruders headed for Antonello’s Polyptych of San Gregorio, a 1473 altarpiece showing the Virgin and Child with attendant saints. They removed the five surviving panels, escaping with three and leaving two propped against a fence outside, authorities said. The thieves also smashed a case to seize a small, double-sided devotional painting by Antonello that depicts the Madonna and Child with a Franciscan monk on one side and the adult Christ on the other.
Marisa Mercurio, the museum’s director, called the theft “an extremely serious and significant loss,” adding that the works hold enormous cultural, artistic and symbolic value for Messina and Sicily. She said staff hope for a swift recovery of the paintings.
The polyptych has already endured tragedy. Originally comprising six panels, it lost one in the 1908 earthquake that devastated Sicily and killed more than 40 percent of Messina’s population at the time.
Roughly 40 works by Antonello are known to survive. The painter is widely regarded as a central figure of the southern Italian Renaissance and a defining artistic presence for Messina. “Antonello is the greatest ambassador of our city because he has Messina in his name,” said Vincenzo Caruso, the city’s chief cultural official.
Antonello has long been credited with transmitting Flemish oil techniques to Italy, though scholars now debate that view. He likely trained in Naples, where he would have encountered works by Netherlandish artists such as Jan van Eyck and Rogier van der Weyden. Art historian Grazia Musolino said the artist helped unite Flemish and Italian approaches during the Renaissance.
Messina museum heist under investigation
The stolen polyptych panels and the double-sided devotional painting were the only works by Antonello still on public display in his native city. The altarpiece, completed six years before his death in 1479, had never left Messina.
Italy has recently reaffirmed Antonello’s stature. Earlier this year, the government paid 14.9 million dollars to acquire his Ecce Homo shortly before it was to be auctioned in New York. The stolen devotional painting sold at auction in 2003 for about 410,000 dollars.
The theft follows encouraging news for Italian authorities, who days earlier announced the recovery of three modern masterpieces stolen in March from the Magnani-Rocca Foundation near Parma. Works by Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Paul Cézanne and Henri Matisse, together valued at more than 10 million dollars, were retrieved.
Police have opened an investigation into the Messina break-in and said witnesses who noticed unusual activity at the museum may have captured useful images. “A heritage belonging to all the people of Messina has been violated,” said Mayor Federico Basile. “Messina will not let its history be stolen.”