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.

It was a terrifying interruption to an otherwise peaceful day at the René Magritte Museum (located in the artist’s former home) on September 29, 2009. As three employees and two tourists enjoyed a quiet morning in the small former home of the artist, the doorbell of the by-appointment-only museum rang just after 10:00. Two men entered, held a gun at the museum attendant who had greeted them, forced everyone to the ground in the museum’s courtyard, and then left with one painting in their possession – the 1948 oil portrait Olympia. The painting, atypical of Magritte’s other surrealist object and landscape portraits, shows his wife, Olympia, lying nude on a beach with a conch shell on her stomach.

The painting is valued at over $1 million, but most experts guess that the thieves did not intend to sell the masterpiece. The painted portrait is far too famous to sell, even on the black market, and the men took only the one piece, despite having time and access to numerous other works. The details of the crime suggest that an illegal collector hired these two men to steal this specific original oil art for his or her own underground collection.