Italy art heist thieves steal $14M in Renoir, Cézanne, Matisse paintings – National

Robbers have run off with millions of dollars worth of paintings by Renoir, Cézanne and Matisse after swiping them from a museum near Parma in northern Italy, investigators said on Monday.

Four 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.

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The thieves stole Fish by Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Odalisque on the Terrace by Henri Matisse and Still Life with Cherries by Paul Cézanne, according to those media reports.

The stolen artworks have an estimated combined worth of more than CAD$14.36 million, the BBC said.

The thieves forced entry through the main door on the first floor of the villa before escaping with the stolen art through the museum gardens and over a fence. The heist was completed in less than three minutes and was highly organized, according to 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 foundation 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 are conducting the investigation into the thefts.

“This is a loss that affects everyone’s cultural heritage,” the statement said.

Renoir emerged as a prolific Impressionist painter in the 1870s and completed Fish — which alone is estimated to be worth CAD$9.6 million — in 1917.

The Cézanne piece, Still Life with Cherries, completed around 1890, is one of a collection of still life cherry-based post-impressionist paintings by the “father of modern art” and is rare for its use of watercolour, which the artist employed more towards the end of his life, according to 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 former home of art historian Luigi Magnani, the foundation hosts 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 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 electric ladder and grinders to break into the second-floor Galerie d’Apollon (Apollo’s Gallery), a large 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, but the theft was already complete, with the thieves escaping in less than eight minutes with jewelry worth USD$102 million.

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