- Thieves in Italy stole art worth $10 million in a three-minute operation.
- The stolen works include pieces by Renoir, Matisse and Cezanne.
- The theft is suspected to be done by an organized gang.
Thieves spent three minutes in an Italian museum earlier this month and got away with paintings by Renoir, Cézanne and Matisse worth millions of dollars.
The heist took place on the night of March 22 when thieves broke in through the front door of the Magnani-Rocca Foundation, per The New York Times. The museum is a private art museum in the countryside outside Parma, a northern Italian city. In just three minutes, the group of four thieves made away with three paintings.
The stolen art works were: “Les Poissons” by Pierre-Auguste Renoir, “Still Life With Cherries” by Paul Cézanne and “Odalisque on the Terrace” by Henri Matisse. Altogether, the paintings are worth around $10 million, according to Italian news media. The thieves abandoned a fourth piece at the scene when they were interrupted by the museum’s security alarm.
The piece by Renoir, “Les Poissons,” is an oil painting on canvas done around 1917 that features the French artist’s late-career Impressionist style. It is estimated to be worth around $7 million on its own.
This theft comes less than six months after a group of thieves broke into the Louvre in Paris in broad daylight and stole some of the museum’s crown jewels. According to The New York Times, these types of heists have surged in recent years as technological advancements and cryptocurrencies have made the stolen treasures easier to launder.
What we know about the theft
The museum stayed open after the theft and the heist was kept under wraps until an Italian news outlet broke the news on Sunday. On Monday, the Carabinieri — an Italian police force — confirmed it was investigating the case.
It was four hooded thieves that made their way through the first floor door of the museum’s Villa of Masterpieces. By keeping the heist a secret, police hoped to catch the thieves if they returned, per CNN.
Surveillance footage showed the thieves escaping with the art through the museum’s gardens as the alarm system rang out in the background.
No arrests have been made in the case, per CNN.
The Magnani-Roca museum holds the collection of art historian Luigi Magnani and also features works by Claude Monet, Peter Paul Rubens, Anthony Van Dyck and Francisco Goya, per NBC News.
Officials believed the theft was “structured and organized” and that it was carried out by an organized gang, per CNN.
The museum has not released a statement or made an official comment on the theft.
The Carabinieri art squad is known for recovering around 100,000 stolen artifacts from around the world each year thanks to a highly sophisticated network that tracks stolen art.