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Four works by 15th-century Renaissance master Antonello da Messina, described by Italy's culture ministry as "of extraordinary value," were stolen from a museum in the Sicilian city of Messina during a national holiday, the BBC reported.
Thieves gained access to the regional museum of Messina, known as MuMe, late Saturday, possibly capitalizing on attention being focused on La Vara, a large religious festival held in the city on Aug. 15 to mark the Ferragosto national holiday. Bypassing the museum's alarm systems, the group broke into a security display box and stole four wood panels painted by Antonello.
Among the stolen works were three of the five surviving panels that made up an altarpiece known as the San Gregorio Polyptych, one of the Sicilian painter's most important works.
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 painter never to have left his home city.
A fourth work was also 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.
Messina Mayor Federico Basile called the theft "deeply reprehensible," saying it was made "even more painful" by the fact that it occurred during the city's traditional celebrations in honor of the Virgin Mary.
Born around 1430, Antonello trained in Naples, where he studied the works of Provencal and Flemish artists, whose influence is visible in his paintings.
In February, the Italian government secured a rare Antonello masterpiece at auction in New York, spending nearly $15 million on his work "Ecce Homo." The painting, sold at Sotheby's, is an intensely human portrait of the suffering Christ believed to have been completed around 1460.
Art thefts are considered frequent in Italy. The Antonello theft took place two days after Italian police recovered three paintings by French masters Paul Cezanne, Pierre-Auguste Renoir and Henri Matisse, worth more than €9 million ($10.4 million), that had been stolen in March from a private museum near the northern city of Parma, allegedly by a gang of Moldovan nationals.
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