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.

I was instantly fascinated when I saw the headline yesterday: "Italians say they may have found Caravaggio bones”. After centuries of mystery, the lost painter may have been located. Researchers in the Italian coastal town of Porto Ercole have studied the remains of a man who was approximately Caravaggio’s age, who died around the same time as Caravaggio, and who had frequent contact with the lead and other metals that were commonly used in 17th century paint. The researchers have begun DNA testing to determine if the bones can be linked genetically to current residents of the town of Caravaggio who are likely relatives of the Baroque portrait painting artist. Within two weeks, we should know if the bones could be those of the painter.

The possibility of making a pilgrimage to visit the remains of the man who was a master of religious paintings, oil painting self portrait painting, and still life oil painted pictures grabbed me immediately. And then, just as quickly, a question hit me: so what?

This week I received an email from an old roommate to inform me that an art history professor of ours from the semester we spent in Italy had unexpectedly died over the weekend. The news surprised me; I hadn’t really known him very well, even when I was a student of his, but he was easily one of the best teachers I ever had. The enthusiasm and knowledge he demonstrated in on-site lectures were unmatched, and at every site we visited, small groups of tourists would inevitably start listening in and following us at a distance, until he laughingly told them there was no need to be shy; they were welcome to join us. More than once, the ends of his lectures were met with rounds of applause from people none of us knew at all.

One thing he made his students understand is that art is about connections between people. Just as his love of art united those unknown tourists – Australian and Japanese vacationers wandering through the Roman Forum or Vatican City – to us – American students sipping espresso and imagining ourselves very cosmopolitan – he showed us that art could connect us to people across time and space. As we stood in the church of San Luigi dei Francesi staring in awe at Caravaggio’s energetic paintings of the life of St. Matthew, he made us understand what those first viewers must have felt as they gasped in fascinated awe and shock at the unconventional and humane representations of such an auspicious saint. When we studied the cold, fascist sculptures in Mussolini’s EUR section of the city, we shared the chilled, stark apprehension that people felt decades ago.