Renaissance paintings by Antonello da Messina stolen from Sicilian museum

Four of the most important works of art by the 15th-century Renaissance master Antonello da Messina were stolen during a national holiday from a museum in the Sicilian port city of Messina.

Thieves gained access to the Regional Museum of Messina, or MuMe, on Saturday evening, possibly capitalising on attention being focused on La Vara, a huge religious festival that takes place in the city on 15 August, when Italy marks the ferragosto national holiday.

Bypassing the alarm systems, the gang broke into a security display box and stole four wood panels painted by Antonello, who is widely credited with transforming the course of Renaissance art.

Thieves took three of the five surviving panels that made up an altarpiece known as the Polittico di San Gregorio, one of the Sicilian painter’s most important works.

“It is an extremely serious and significant loss,” said Marisa Mercurio, the director of the Regional Museum of Messina. “They have stolen works of enormous cultural, artistic and symbolic importance, not only for Messina but for Sicily as a whole. All we can do now is hope they are recovered as soon as possible.”

Originally composed of six panels created for the Monastero di San Gregorio, which was destroyed in the 1908 Messina earthquake, the altarpiece was the only work by the Sicilian painter never to have left his home city.

A fourth work was taken from a secure display case: a small double-sided painting depicting the Virgin and Child with a Franciscan monk on one side and Christ on the other.

The painting had belonged to the Wilhelm Soldan collection and was sold by Christie’s to the Sicilian regional government in 2003, the year it was attributed to Antonello.

The haul could have been even greater: six paintings were stolen in tota, but, inexplicably, two of the panels were abandoned on a low wall outside the museum.

Born around ​1430, Antonello trained in Naples where he studied the works of Provençal and Flemish artists, whose influence is apparent in his works.

“Antonello was instrumental in bringing Flemish oil-painting techniques to Italy, making possible a new softness, delicate glazing and subtle shading,” said Valentina Certo, an art historian affiliated with the University of Messina and author of the illustrated children’s book The Workshop of Antonello da Messina. “Even on very small panels, he was capable of extraordinary precision and detail.”

“The overnight theft is a wound inflicted on the historical memory and cultural identity of the city of Messina,” she added. “These were works that had survived the earthquake, destruction and five centuries of history. To see them taken from the public in this way makes the loss impossible to measure in purely economic terms.”

On 28 December 1908, the city of Messina was struck by what is still considered the deadliest natural catastrophe in modern European history: a 7.1-magnitude earthquake lasting 37 seconds that killed half its population and levelled much of the city.

Along with homes, churches and monuments, invaluable historical sources and documents were lost, including works by Antonello.

In February, the Italian government secured a rare Antonello masterpiece at auction in New York, spending $14.9m (£11m) on his Ecce Homo. The painting, sold at Sotheby’s, is an intensely human portrait of the suffering Christ, believed to have been completed in about 1460.

Prosecutors in Messina have opened an investigation into the theft. Police sources said the museum was fitted with several surveillance cameras and that the works were protected by a sophisticated alarm system. Investigators are examining several lines of inquiry, including whether the paintings were stolen for the illicit art market.

According to the state news agency Ansa, investigators are also considering the possibility that the theft was carried out on commission for an art dealer.

The theft took place after Italian police on Friday had recovered three paintings by the French masters Paul Cézanne, Pierre-Auguste Renoir and Henri Matisse that were stolen earlier this year from a private museum near the northern city of Parma.