The Caravaggio

On the night of the seventeenth and eighteenth of October 1969, in a heavy rainstorm in Palermo, Sicily, two men forced the front door of the Oratorio di San Lorenzo. The oratory is a small Baroque chapel in the centre of the old city, on a side street, behind a residential block. The interior is, to anyone who walks in, breath-stopping — the walls are entirely covered in Giacomo Serpotta's seventeenth-century white stucco, dense with angels, putti, and allegorical figures. The men did not take any of the stucco. They walked past everything. They walked to the wall behind the altar, where a single painting was hanging.

It was Caravaggio's Nativity with St. Francis and St. Lawrence. Painted in 1609, in the last year of the artist's life. Fourteen square metres of canvas. Holy family attended by two saints, in dramatic chiaroscuro, the Madonna's red robe in the lit centre. It had hung in the oratory continuously, behind the altar, for three hundred and sixty years.

The cut

The painting hung in a heavy gilded frame, mounted to the wall above the altar with iron brackets. The men did not remove the frame. They cut the canvas out of the frame, along the inner edge of the gilded moulding, with a sharp blade. They rolled the canvas — fourteen square metres, approximately the size of a generous Italian sofa — and walked it out of the oratory in a tube. They left through the front door. They disappeared into the rain.

By morning, the painting was gone. The frame was empty. The Carabinieri, when they arrived that day, photographed it. That photograph — the empty gilded frame on the wall above the altar, with the cut edge of the canvas still visible at the inner moulding — has come to stand, in the visual history of European art crime, for the painting itself.

Cosa Nostra

The Caravaggio was, by every indication that has emerged in the half-century since the theft, in the hands — at least originally — of the Sicilian Mafia. The theft style is consistent with mid-twentieth-century Cosa Nostra property crime: small team, professional entry, single high-value target, no collateral damage. The painting was probably stolen on commission, originally for a private collector, possibly within the network of a senior Mafia figure. There has never been any direct evidence to refine the picture beyond that.

Over the decades, multiple Mafia informants — pentiti — have given statements about the painting to Italian investigators. The painting, by various accounts, was kept in different houses in different parts of Sicily and southern Italy throughout the 1970s. It was, at various points, said to have been: rolled inside a carpet in an apartment in Palermo; hidden in a barn in Calabria, where rats were said to have damaged a portion of the surface; stored in a stable, where a donkey was said to have urinated on a corner; cut into smaller pieces and distributed among different boss families to share possession.

The most credible account

The most credible statement on the painting's fate came from the Mafia informant Gaspare Spatuzza, in 2009. Spatuzza, in giving evidence to Italian magistrates on a separate set of cases, stated under oath that he had been told by other Mafia members that the Caravaggio had been kept in a barn in the early 1970s, that the painting had been damaged by pigs and rats, and that, by the late 1970s, the painting had been so badly damaged that the Cosa Nostra had decided to destroy it, to remove all traces. He stated that it had been burned in approximately 1980.

There has, in 1996, been a separate claim from a different informant that the painting was destroyed during the 1980s earthquake in southern Italy. There has, in 2017, been a claim that fragments of the painting are held in a secure location and may be available for negotiation. None of these claims has been verified. The Italian Carabinieri's art-theft division — the Comando Carabinieri Tutela Patrimonio Culturale — has continued to investigate the case for over fifty-five years. It is, by their own admission, the case the unit is still trying to close.

The reproduction

In 2001, a high-quality reproduction of the Nativity was placed on the altar of the Oratorio di San Lorenzo. The reproduction had been commissioned by the Sicilian regional government and was painted by a Sicilian artist working from photographs of the original. The reproduction is now what visitors to the oratory see today. It is technically excellent. It is not the painting.

There are, in the world, between sixty and ninety paintings now reliably attributed to Caravaggio. The Nativity, when it hung in the Oratorio di San Lorenzo, was one of them. There may now be eighty-nine. We do not know. We have not seen the painting since the morning before the rainstorm in October 1969.

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Listen to the full story on The Vault, Episode 16. Stream the episode here.