Thieves Strike Sicilian Museum on a Holy Day: Four Antonello da Messina Works Stolen

Four works by the Sicilian Renaissance painter Antonello da Messina were stolen from the Museo Regionale di Messina in Sicily on the night of 15 August 2026, as the city celebrated the Assumption Day holiday.

Messina's mayor, Federico Basile, told Reuters that the thieves entered the museum late on Saturday during the city's festivities, which include the traditional Vara procession — a towering religious float paraded through the streets. The gang smashed display cases and seized their haul in roughly two to three minutes, according to museum surveillance footage reported by the Sicilian newspaper Gazzetta del Sud. The alarm system activated immediately when the glass was broken, Gazzetta del Sud reported, though the robbers were gone before anyone could intervene.

The stolen works are worth millions of euros, according to AP. They include four wooden panels from the Polittico di San Gregorio, an altarpiece painted in 1473 that measures 170 cm by 203 cm. The altarpiece was originally made up of six panels, commissioned from Antonello by Fabria Cirino, the abbess of the Monastero di San Gregorio — a monastery destroyed in Sicily's devastating 1908 earthquake. The thieves initially took five of the panels but abandoned two outside the museum: those depicting St Benedict and St Gregory, according to the Italian art publication Finestre sull'Arte.

The fourth stolen work is a small double-sided painting showing the Virgin with Child and a Franciscan monk on one side and Christ on the other. It was taken from a secure display case, and its provenance — the documented chain of ownership — traces back to the Wilhelm Soldan collection, which Christie's sold to the Sicilian Region in 2003.

Italian culture minister Alessandro Giuli expressed "dismay and regret" in a government statement on 16 August. Sicilian regional president Renato Schifani called the theft an affront to universal cultural heritage and launched an internal inspection, pledging full cooperation with law enforcement. Regional official Francesco Paolo Scarpinato described the loss as "a deep wound for Sicily and for all of Italy." Museum director Marisa Mercurio told Sky TG24 that the stolen works hold considerable significance in terms of local identity as well as artistic and cultural value.

Christopher Marinello, founder of Art Recovery International, noted that the criminals were likely not local and that the theft bore an eerie similarity to the 1990 Isabella Stewart Gardner heist in Boston, when two men dressed as police officers stole 13 works in 81 minutes. Neither case has been solved.

The theft comes six months after the Italian government purchased another Antonello da Messina work, Ecce Homo and Saint Jerome in the Desert, from Sotheby's for US$15 million in February 2026 — a reminder of the painter's market value even as the stolen works, as items of cultural heritage, cannot be openly sold.

Antonello da Messina, born in Messina around 1430, is credited with bringing oil-painting techniques from Northern Europe to Italy, bridging two of the Renaissance's great traditions. The works taken from his hometown museum are irreplaceable to the city's identity. Two panels sit where the thieves dropped them. Four do not.