Robbers have run off with hundreds of thousands of dollars value of paintings by Renoir, Cézanne and Matisse after swiping them from a museum near Parma in northern Italy, investigators said on Monday.
4 masked men entered the villa of the Magnani Rocca Foundation and made off with the artworks on the night of March 22, a police spokesperson said, The Guardian, The BBC and NBC News reported.
The thieves stole Fish by Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Odalisque on the Terrace by Henri Matisse and Still Life with Cherries by Paul Cézanne, based on those media reports.
The stolen artworks have an estimated combined value of greater than CAD$14.36 million, the BBC said.
The thieves forced entry through the predominant door on the primary floor of the villa before escaping with the stolen art through the museum gardens and over a fence. The heist was accomplished in lower than three minutes and was highly organized, based on the Italian national news outlet Il Messaggero.
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The alarm and surveillance systems prevented them from stealing more, Italian media reported.
The inspiration said in a Facebook statement Monday morning that it was working with the Carabinieri Unit for the Protection of Cultural Heritage and the relevant authorities, who’re conducting the investigation into the thefts.
“This can be a loss that affects everyone’s cultural heritage,” the statement said.
Renoir emerged as a prolific Impressionist painter within the 1870s and accomplished Fish — which alone is estimated to be value CAD$9.6 million — in 1917.
The Cézanne piece, Still Life with Cherries, accomplished around 1890, is considered one of a group of still life cherry-based post-impressionist paintings by the “father of recent art” and is rare for its use of watercolour, which the artist employed more towards the tip of his life, based on the Magnani Rocca Foundation.
Odalisque on the Terrace, painted by Matisse in 1922, is a renowned oil painting depicting a lounging nude figure posing as an “odalisque”— a chambermaid or concubine in a Turkish harem.
Established in 1977 in the previous home of art historian Luigi Magnani, the inspiration hosts his private collection, which incorporates works by Dürer, Rubens, Van Dyck, Goya and Monet, amongst others. The Italian museum is the most recent European institution to be targeted in a brazen, high-profile art heist.
Last October, in broad daylight, thieves in Paris breached the Louvre and made off with a stash of priceless jewelry.
Masked assailants used an electrical ladder and grinders to interrupt into the second-floor Galerie d’Apollon (Apollo’s Gallery), a big room where the stolen items were displayed.
The thieves smashed two display cases and fled on motorbikes, authorities said. Alarms brought Louvre agents to the room, forcing the intruders to bolt, however the theft was already complete, with the thieves escaping in lower than eight minutes with jewelry value USD$102 million.
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