What is twenty million dollars worth when you can't show it, sell it, or even insure it?
On the night of 17 to 18 October 1969, two men broke into the Oratory of San Lorenzo, a small chapel in Palermo's old Kalsa district. With a blade, they cut out a canvas nearly nine feet high: the Nativity with St Francis and St Lawrence, one of Caravaggio's last great paintings. Then they vanished. More than fifty years later, no one has seen it again.
The FBI lists the theft among the ten most significant unsolved art crimes, and values the painting at twenty million dollars. But that figure is misleading. What is a masterpiece worth when it can't be shown, sold or even insured? Its value exists only in the shadows, where criminal networks can use a stolen work as currency.
Informants from the Sicilian Mafia have offered contradictory accounts. Francesco Marino Mannoia claimed to have taken part in the theft: the buyer, he said, backed out when he saw the damage done by cutting the canvas. Gaetano Grado spoke of amateur thieves, a painting handed to the boss Gaetano Badalamenti and then sold to a Swiss dealer. A darker version says it was left on a farm, gnawed by rats and pigs, and finally burned. One thing is certain: Palermo's prosecutors have reopened the case.
Today, a high-fidelity replica, unveiled in 2015, hangs in the original's place. It reproduces every detail, but not the mystery.
This is exactly where Pierre Terestry's work begins. In The Twins of Caravaggio, the art journalist and his friend Claudio Fornari, a leading expert on the master, follow the trail of a painting that resurfaces between Venice and Palermo, amid the Mafia, corrupt cultural officials and one dizzying question: how do you prove a work is authentic? The Palermo Nativity is the shadow hanging over every story of this kind.
Pierre Terestry would say it plainly: an art theft is never just a theft. It is a story still waiting for its final page.
And you, where do you think it is?
Henry de Toubeyre.
Beacons: https://beacons.ai/henrydetoubeyre