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.

Even more devastating was the 2009 account from another informer, Gaspare Spatuzzo, who reported that the painting was largely eaten by rats and pigs when it was hidden in a barn and subsequently burned. The truth is foggy, but what we do know is that no one has seen the painted portrait in over 40 years, and the FBI maintains the theft as one of its top ten art crimes, valuing the painting at $20 million.

As one of Caravaggio’s last paintings, this masterpiece is truly irreplaceable. But what really shocks me about this crime, though, is the detail that Mannoia shared, that the so-called collector wept when he saw what had happened to “his” painting. It’s the thing that I always find strange about art theft. I’m sure that this collector would claim to love Caravaggio’s work – but how much can he really love it? To put portraits and paintings in danger, to keep them from the public and even unintentionally destroy them, is a crime much more offensive than the basic theft of money – it’s a theft of our cultural, intellectual heritage, and that’s something no true art lover could approve of.

Don't miss the other blog posts in my series on lost paintings!

10 Lost Paintings:

• #10 - Magritte's Olympia
• #9 - Caravaggio's St. Matthew and the Angel