ROME — Paintings by the French masters Paul Cézanne, Pierre-Auguste Renoir and Henri Matisse were stolen from a museum near Parma in a brazen nighttime heist, Italian authorities said Monday.
The Magnani Rocca Foundation museum in the northern town of Traversetolo described the March 22 theft as a highly professional operation, executed in less than three minutes, Italian media reported. Four masked men are believed to have forced their way through an entry gate, grabbed the paintings and escaped by climbing a fence, authorities told The Washington Post.
The arrival of museum security and the Carabinieri is believed to have prevented a larger heist. The paintings’ combined value was expected to exceed $10 million, Italian television reported.
The theft of the three relatively small paintings — Renoir’s “Fish,” Cézanne’s “Cup and Plate with Cherries” and Matisse’s “Odalisque on the Terrace,” was reported publicly only this week. Their size, authorities told The Post, made them easier than larger works to remove.
The Carabinieri were investigating with their specialized Art Squad, authorities said.
The collection was assembled by the critic, musicologist and writer Luigi Magnani. It also includes Titian, Dürer, Rubens, Goya, Canova, Monet and others.
“He was a large landowner who would invest in paintings and ended up creating one of the world’s finest museums,” said Antonio Mascolo, a veteran journalist in Parma. “When I once interviewed him, he had an orchestra playing live for us. He had the kind of paintings Spain would go to war with [Italy] over.”
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