The Theft of Caravaggio’s Nativity

Nick Gordon

October, 1969. Two thieves enter an oratory in Palermo through an unbarred side window. They carefully cut a 2 x 2.7 metre canvas from its wooden stretcher, itself encased in delicate eighteenth-century stucco and hanging 6 metres above the floor. They roll it up in a carpet and disappear into the night. The theft of Caravaggio’s Nativity remains unsolved: its current condition, whereabouts and even existence are unknown.

Palermo’s Oratorio di San Lorenzo is not remote – it’s in the centre of the old town, just a stone’s throw from the historic Vucciria market – and yet there were no witnesses to this crime. Indeed, even the exact date of the theft is uncertain. The painting was last seen by the oratory’s congregation on 12 October, and the theft was discovered on 18 October by Maria Gelfi, a neighbour and the oratory’s caretaker. (She also reported the missing carpet.)

That a work by Caravaggio might have gone six days without being seen may surprise us, but in the 1960s Caravaggio had not yet become the art superstar that we revere today. This work was also not particularly well known – that is, until RAI, the Italian state broadcaster, was given permission by the Sicilian authorities to film a ‘hidden treasures’ documentary inside the oratory. This went to air in August 1969, despite the attempts of parish priest Benedetto Rocco to prevent its release. He knew that the key to the masterpiece’s safety was its obscurity: the oratory lacked basic security, and his requests to have its windows barred had been denied. Maria Gelfi, who discovered the theft, reported having seen suspicious-looking characters peering through the window in the weeks before the painting went missing. Thieves? Or just people wanting to steal a glimpse of the Caravaggio painting they’d seen on TV?

The masterpiece

Caravaggio’s Nativity with St Francis and St Lawrence was commissioned by the Confraternity of St Lawrence, a lay religious organisation, for the Palermo oratory in 1609. At this point in his life, Caravaggio had been on the run for 3 years: after murdering a man in Rome, he had fled to Naples and then on to Malta, only to flee the island after his arrest for an altercation with a Knight. He escaped to Sicily, leaving late masterpieces in Syracuse, Messina and Palermo, and must have finished The Nativity no later than October 1609. This was, when, having received a papal pardon for the murder in Rome, Caravaggio began making his way back north. He died, probably of malaria, in Porto Ercole. This is one of his final paintings.

The Nativity offers a wonderful example of Caravaggio’s characteristic chiaroscuro, with heightened contrasts between the deep blacks and browns that dominate the painting, and accents of colour in a shaft of light from the top right that catches the robes and skin of the angel, St Lawrence, Mary and Christ. The drama we associate with Caravaggio’s mature works in Rome has been muted: the angel’s robes don’t billow enormously, no one gestures with great aplomb, and we’re not confronted with swords or dirty feet.

Instead, the figures are engaged in introspection and their calmness is conveyed through the composition. The tight grouping of the figures on the right (Joseph, the shepherd and St Francis) are carefully balanced by the void on the left, itself created by the space between three figures (Mary, the angel and St Lawrence). The gazes and gestures of both groups guide us gently down to the infant Christ, who we see emerging obliquely from the shadow cast by Mary’s body.

In Caravaggio’s time, the oratory had been recently completed by the Confraternity of St Lawrence, a lay religious association of mostly Genovese merchants in Palermo. Caravaggio’s work was to be the new high altarpiece, sympathetically updated in the early 1700s by master stucco artist Giacomo Serpotta. His elaborate works later surrounded the painting, covering all of the oratory’s walls, and are still a highlight of a visit.

A difficult job

And herein lies a problem for the painting’s theft more than 250 years later: stucco is delicate, decorative and not capable of sustaining much weight. Yet the oratory’s stuccoes were left undamaged by the theft. At its top, the canvas was almost 6 metres above the floor, hanging several metres above the altar. Even an accomplished, jockey-sized cat burglar would struggle to climb the surrounding stucco structure without severely damaging it (and him or herself in the process), let alone hang from it with one hand to execute a perfect cut along the upper edges of the canvas. And the cut was perfect: not even a skerrick of paint remained outside of the canvas removed.

The use of a ladder would avoid these difficulties, but a 6-metre-long ladder, even when folded, is a heavy and conspicuous object to carry into a church. Perhaps the thieves knew where a ladder was stored inside the oratory (if indeed there was one)? Perhaps, after climbing through the window, they opened the front door and let the ladder-bearer in? Unfortunately, the records of the original police investigation have gone missing from the archives, and those who first discovered the crime are long dead. If there was a ladder lying around, or marks left by one on the wall above the painting, we can no longer know.

Speculation and conflicting testimony

The cleanness of the cut and the lack of damage to the surrounding stucco led the art theft branch of Italy’s Carabinieri to conclude that the job was executed by professionals. But this line of inquiry was abandoned, especially after rumours began to circulate in the 1980s about the painting’s whereabouts.

One of the first to come forward was Marino “Mozzarella” Mannoia, a chemist who as a young man had refined a tonne of heroine for the Santa Maria di Gesù family in Palermo and would later do the same for the vicious Corleoni. Mannoia was a lucky man – he’d found himself in prison in 1983, when his boss Stefano Bontade and hundreds of associates were murdered in the Second Mafia War, and he was again in prison in 1986 when his brother and a number of others were killed for plotting to overthrow Salvatore Riina, the head of the Corleoni.

In 1989, still in gaol, he requested an audience with the leading Anti-Mafia magistrate, Giovanni Falcone, becoming a pentito or mafioso-turned-government witness. Mannoia’s testimony to Falcone was mostly focused on the heroin rings he’d been involved with in Italy and the US, along with his damaging eye-witness accounts of meetings between Mafia leaders and former prime minister Giulio Andreotti. But another claim emerged from his depositions: Mannoia claimed to be one of the two thieves who stole the Caravaggio.

His story went against the theory of a professional art theft, with the two amateurs rolling the work up in a carpet with the painted side facing inwards. Rolling an old canvas in this way causes irreparable damage – the sharp contraction of the painted surface would have resulted in flaking paint and deep horizontal cracks along its entire width. Mannoia himself said they had done major damage to the painting.

What happened next, if Mannoia was telling the truth, became the subject of conflicting testimony in the 1990s and early 2000s. Another pentito, Alberti, claimed to have bought the canvas and buried it, along with a pile of cash, in his garden. Excavation of his property turned up nothing. Another hitman, Gaspare Spatuzza, claimed that he kept the painting in a barn, where it was trampled by swine and nibbled by rats. Judge Falcone’s murderer, Giovanni Brusca, offered to return the work in exchange for leniency. The list of theories grew and became more spectacular, as this article by Bernardo Tortorici di Raffadali in The Art Newspaper shows: the President of the Friends of Sicilian Museums outlines a number of them, including one that the Mafia only pretended they stole Caravaggio’s Nativity so that they could hide the existence of another criminal organisation operating successfully in Sicily.

New evidence

Interest in the theft grew in the lead-up to the 50th anniversary, and the case was reopened in 2017. New statements were taken from Mannoia (who had lived most of his subsequent life in FBI witness protection in the US), along with testimony from another pentito, Gaetano Grado.  

The new evidence pointed towards Gaetano Badalamenti, a Sicilian mafioso and successful trafficker of heroin into the USA, before he was caught in an investigation led by Rudy Giuliani. The 2017 commission concluded that Badalamenti had ordered the theft, intending to sell the painting to an unknown buyer. When that sale fell through, Badalamenti got in touch with an art dealer in Switzerland, who is said to have broken down in tears upon seeing the damaged painting. At this point, it was said to be so degraded that the only option was to cut it up and sell it in pieces. Whether that happened or not is uncertain, and Badalamenti couldn’t cast light on the masterpiece’s fate as he’d died in a Massachusetts hospital in 2004.

Further evidence of the mafioso’s involvement, however, surfaced in 2019, when a video interview with the parish priest, Benedetto Rocco, was seen by The Guardian. (You can watch a short excerpt of the interview here.) The video had been recorded by director Massimo d’Anolfi in 2001.

In it, Rocco says he had been notified by a Mafia organisation that they had the painting and wanted to negotiate its return with the Church. Rocco brought these demands to the attention of Vincenzo Scuderi, Palermo’s superintendent of art and culture and the producer of the 1969 documentary about The Nativity. Scuderi declined to be involved after Rocco received a second letter with what purported to be a piece of the painting. Without institutional backing, the ‘negotiation’ went nowhere, although Rocco believed the painting to be in Badalamenti’s house. But Rocco himself could not be interviewed as part of the new investigation, as he had died in 2013.

The replica

The whereabouts of the original, or if it survives at all, remain a mystery. As part of the fiftieth anniversary of the theft, however, the broadcaster Sky initiated a grand project. They commissioned a replica to be made by Factum Arte, a Milan and Madrid-based company that specialises in cutting-edge reproductions. The firm won, for example, the contract to recreate Tutankhamun’s tomb.

Only a handful of photographs of the original remained, and rarely with the degree of detail required to create a 1:1 replica of the original. Factum Arte undertook months of research, using the surviving images and intense study of Caravaggio’s paintings in Rome, to enhance their state-of-the-art digital printing with hand-painted oil paint. The final work is on canvas, which had been prepared with size and gesso the way that Caravaggio did it. It was printed layer by layer, replicating the process of oil painting starting with the layers of brown washes and underpainting, and then adding richer layers of colour over the top. The project was immense, and you can read about it at Factum Arte here.

Ultimately, while Caravaggio’s Nativity remains at large, if it survives at all, a team of painters, printers, photographers, architects and conservators have ensured that we can still have the experience of seeing it again. The small Oratorio di San Lorenzo is flooded with light, thanks to the blinding white of Serpotta’s cheeky stucco cherubs who frolic across the walls. The inlaid floor of semi-precious stones has been brought back to a high polish, its warm tones picking up the browns, ochres and whites of the ‘Caravaggio’ that finally hangs above the altar once more.

DR Nick Gordon

Nick Gordon is a well-known lecturer on fine art and history, with a PhD and University Medal from the University of Sydney. He regularly offers popular lectures on art, history and culture, including for the Australian Decorative and Fine Arts Society (ADFAS).

Nick is a product manager with Limelight Arts Travel, designing our art, history and culture tours.

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