The Caravaggio

Palermo, Sicily, the night of 17-18 October 1969. A heavy rainstorm has emptied the streets. Two men force the front door of the Oratorio di San Lorenzo, a small Baroque oratory in the centre of the old city, walls entirely covered in Giacomo Serpotta's seventeenth-century white stucco. They walk past everything except a single painting hanging above the altar.

It is Caravaggio's Nativity with St. Francis and St. Lawrence. Painted in 1609, in the last year of his life. Fourteen square metres of canvas, dramatic chiaroscuro, the holy family attended by two saints, the Madonna's red robe in the lit centre. It has hung in the oratory continuously for 360 years.

They do not remove the heavy gilded frame. They cut the canvas out of the frame with a sharp blade, along the inner edge of the moulding. They roll it. They walk out into the rain. By morning the frame is empty.

The painting has not been seen since. Multiple Mafia informants over the decades have offered conflicting accounts — that it was kept in barns, damaged by rats and pigs, kept rolled in carpets, cut into pieces, eventually burned around 1980. The Italian Carabinieri's art-theft division has investigated for over 55 years. The case is still officially open. A high-quality reproduction now hangs in the original frame.

Maren and Ellis on the most famous unsolved art theft in southern European history, and the empty frame that waited 32 years for an answer.