From a Caravaggio portrait painting that was rejected and accidentally destroyed as collateral damage of war, our next stop is a Caravaggio painting that was likely the victim of another kind of war: mob war.

When Caravaggio fled to Sicily in 1608, just one year before he died, he left behind four large original oil paintings. One of them, the Nativity with St. Francis and St. Lawrence, was the pride of the Oratory of San Lorenzo in Palermo until October of 1969, when it was discovered that thieves had entered the church in the middle of the night and cut the hand painted oil on canvas from its frame. The thieves also took a number of decorative art pieces from the church, but the Holy Family portrait painting was the obvious focus of the heist.

Literally nothing more was heard of the painting for 27 years, when a Mafia informant, Francesco Marino Mannoia (seen below), said that he had participated in the theft as a young man. In the home of “Cosa Nostra”, Sicilians had long suspected mob involvement in the crime, and Mannoia’s bold claims rang true with most who heard them. Residents of Palermo and art historians alike were horrified to hear Mannoia’s story that the portrait oil canvas was so damaged in transit that the illegal collector who arranged the theft cried when he saw it.