Thieves in Italy steal $14M in Renoir, Cézanne, Matisse paintings – National
Thieves made off with millions of dollars worth of paintings by Renoir, Cézanne and Matisse after they swiped them from a museum near Parma in northern Italy, investigators said Monday.
Four masked men entered the village of the Magnani Rocca Foundation and took the artwork with them on the night of March 22, said a police spokesperson, The Guardian, BBC and NBC News.
Thieves stole A fish by Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Odalisque on the Terrace by Henri Matisse and You are in Life with Cherris by Paul Cézanne, according to those press reports.
The stolen artworks have an estimated combined value of more than CAD$14.36 million, the BBC said.
The thieves forced their way through the main door on the first floor of the villa before escaping with the stolen art through the museum’s gardens and over a fence. The robbery was completed in less than three minutes and was well planned, according to Italy’s national newspaper Il Messaggero.
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Alarm and surveillance systems have prevented them from committing more thefts, Italian media reported.
The foundation said in a statement on Facebook on Monday morning that it is cooperating with the Carabinieri Unit for the Protection of Cultural Heritage and the relevant authorities, who are conducting an investigation into the theft.
“This is a loss that affects everyone’s culture,” the statement said.
Renoir emerged as a prominent Impressionist painter in the 1870s and was eliminated fish – which alone is estimated at CAD $9.6 million – in 1917.
Portrait of Cézanne You are in Life with Cherris, completed around 1890, is one of the surviving cherry-post-impressionist paintings by the “father of modern art” and a rare use of watercolor, which the artist used extensively towards the end of his life, according to the Magnani Rocca Foundation.
Odalisque on the Terracepainted by Matisse in 1922, is a well-known oil painting depicting a crying nude person posing as an “odalisque”—a maid or concubine in a Turkish brothel.
Founded in 1977 in the former home of art historian Luigi Magnani, the foundation houses his private collection, which includes works by Dürer, Rubens, Van Dyck, Goya and Monet, among others. The Italian museum is the latest European institution to be dedicated to a senseless, sophisticated crime.
Last October, in broad daylight, thieves in Paris broke into the Louvre and got away with a lot of valuable jewelry.
The masked attackers used an electric ladder and grinders to break into the Galerie d’Apollon (Apollo’s Gallery), on the second floor, a large room where the stolen items were displayed.
The thieves smashed two display cases and fled on motorcycles, authorities said. The alarms brought Louvre agents to the room, which forced the attackers to close, but the theft was over, and the thieves escaped in less than eight minutes with jewelry worth USD $102 million.
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