Four paintings by the Renaissance master Antonello da Messina were stolen from a museum in Messina, Sicily, on Saturday, Italian officials said.
Taking advantage of an annual religious celebration that brings tens of thousands to Messina’s streets, thieves made off with three of five panels that constitute the Polyptych of San Gregorio as well as a small double-sided devotional painting. They are the only works by Antonello da Messina, commonly called Antonello, that remained in his native city.
The celebration, the Procession of the Vara, is a religious ritual that takes places every Aug. 15. Some 100,000 people attended the celebration and the city’s law enforcement officials were focused on maintaining order there, city officials said. “Coinciding with la Vara, it was certainly a planned theft,” Mayor Federico Basile said in a telephone interview.
Commissioned in the 15th century for the church of San Gregorio, which was destroyed during a devastating earthquake in 1908, the San Gregorio altarpiece originally consisted of six panels. Only five remain and were housed at Messina’s Accascina Regional Museum.
The thieves initially took all five remaining panels, but left two behind near a fence outside the museum, perhaps in their haste to escape, Mr. Basile said. The mayor said that passers-by noticed “suspicious activity” at the museum and immediately alerted the police.
Vincenzo Caruso, Messina’s chief cultural official, said that the thieves smashed a sealed case to get to the other work they stole, a small double-sided panel that depicts the Madonna and Child with a Franciscan friar on one side, and Christ on the other.
He said police were reviewing security camera footage from inside and outside the museum to look for clues. “From what I understand some people saw the theft and hopefully they took photographs,” he said.
Mr. Caruso said interest in Antonello spiked this year after the Italian government bought a painting by the artist for $15 million.
An official with Italy’s art theft squad said investigations had begun but declined to provide further details. On Friday, Italians celebrated the recovery of three artworks that had been stolen from a museum near Parma earlier this year.
Antonello is considered one of the Renaissance’s great artists and is known for his mastery of portraiture. There are only some 40 works definitively attributed to him, said Grazia Musolino, an art historian who curated a recent catalog about him. “He made a crucial contribution to the Renaissance by unifying two very important aspects of Renaissance art: the work of Flemish artists and Italian art,” she said.
The two works were the only paintings by Antonello to remain in the city where he was born around 1430 and where he lived on and off until his death there in 1479. The larger work is signed and dated 1473. The double-sided panel was created slightly earlier and was bought by the Sicilian Region at a Sotheby’s auction in 2003.
The theft is a blow to the city. Mr. Basile, the mayor, said that for the past few years the city has focused on the “Messina, City of Antonello” brand and was moving forward with a plan to create a virtual museum in Antonello’s home.
“Antonello is the greatest ambassador of our city because he has Messina in his name,” said Mr. Caruso.
Experts said that works stolen from museums are notoriously difficult to sell. Francesco Finocchiaro, the coordinator of Archeoclub d’Italia in Sicily, a cultural heritage association, said his fear was that “intermediaries and unscrupulous collectors could be behind the theft of works of this significance.”
Marisa Mercurio, the director of the museum, declined to be interviewed, but told Sky News Italia that the museum’s alarms and security systems were operational and guards were present. “It’s not true that there was no security,” she said.
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