Thieves Steal Four Antonello da Messina Paintings from Sicilian Museum
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MILAN (AP) – Thieves stole four works attributed to the Sicilian Renaissance painter Antonello da Messina from a regional museum in the Sicilian city of Messina on the Italian Ferragosto holiday, the news agency LaPresse reported Sunday.
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BBC NewsThe theft comes just days after Italy's specialist art crime unit announced it had recovered three artworks stolen from a museum near Parma earlier this year.
NPR NewsWhile attention in the city may have been elsewhere, thieves got past the alarm system at Messina's Museo Interdisciplinare Regionale (MuMe), and broke open a security case. They soon left with four wooden panels by the city's famed Renaissance painter, Antonello da Messina.
PBS NewsHourThieves steal 4 Renaissance artworks in a Sicilian museum heist during an Italian holiday Art expert Alberto Fiz estimated the value of the stolen works at 70 million euros ($81 million) to 80 million euros ($92 million).
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Antonello's work is highly prized in his home country. Just this February, the Italian government spent $14.9 million at a New York auction to bring another Antonello work, called Ecce Homo, back home. That portrait of the suffering Christ is believed to date to around 1460, and was purchased at Sotheby's. It will be housed in a museum in Abruzzo, on the mainland.
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BreitbartThe Italian government in March bought a devotional painting titled “Ecce Homo” by da Messina for $14.9 million from Sotheby’s auction house in New York – raising the profile of the early Renaissance painter.
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Among them: an October 2025 raid in which thieves spent less than eight minutes stripping the Louvre's Apollo Gallery of jewels worth more than $100 million, an incident whose fallout eventually pushed out the museum's director.
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BBC NewsThe security of priceless artworks and artefacts in European museums was thrown into question late last year when a gang of thieves broke into the Louvre in Paris in broad daylight, making off with €88m worth of historic jewellery.
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01 NPR News Then came the bad news. The following night, a Saturday, was an Italian holiday known as Ferragosto, when much of the country was out celebrating. In the Sicilian city of Messina, a major religious festival held every August 15, called La Vara, had also drawn thousands to the streets.
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02 BBC News Police are now probing how the thieves were able to enter the museum without triggering its alarms and who may have been responsible.
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03 Breitbart “Stealing an Antonello may be far easier than selling one. If these are ordinary thieves, they will soon discover that – to their cost,” Albertson, who is the chief executive of the ARCA art crimes research association, told the Italian daily La Repubblica. She said such famous artworks often pass from one criminal to another, serving as collateral for other illicit activity.
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04 Washington Times A print by Pablo Picasso, initially stolen from a Milwaukee gallery in 2018, was found by a landlord and turned in to the local police.
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