Paintings by Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Paul Cezanne and Henri Matisse have been stolen from a museum in northern Italy, in a brazen heist that took just three minutes, according to authorities.
Renoir’s 1917 oil painting “Les Poissons,” Cezanne’s 1890 watercolor “Tasse et plat de cerises” and Matisse’s 1922 piece of work “Odalisque sur la terrasse” were taken from the Magnani Rocca Foundation, located near the city of Parma, a spokesperson for the Carabinieri of Parma and the Cultural Heritage Protection Unit of Bologna told CNN.
Four hooded thieves forced their way through a first floor door in the museum’s Villa of Masterpiece overnight between March 22 and 23, but the museum chose to keep the audacious heist a secret, the police spokesperson told CNN, in the hope of catching the thieves if they returned.
Police said the surveillance footage shows the thieves making off with the paintings across the lush gardens of the villa, with the museum’s alarm system sounding in the background.
No arrests have been made and the museum continues to remain open during its usual business hours.
The Magnani Rocca Foundation has loaned artworks from all over the world, including collections from the David Zwirner Gallery in New York and the Getty Museum in Los Angeles.
A lawyer for the foundation told CNN that the theft was “structured and organized” and that the thieves may have been inspired by the relative ease with which burglars broke into the Louvre in Paris in October.
The “clearly planned heist” was not completely successful due to the foundation’s internal protective system, including the use of automatically locking doors and alarms, said the lawyer, who did not want to be named.
Italy’s elite Carabinieri art squad collects around 100,000 stolen artifacts from all over the world each year thanks to a highly sophisticated network that tracks stolen art, according to their spokesperson.
Luigi Magnani, who died in 1984 at the age of 78, was an art critic, musicologist and writer who opened his estate and private collections, including works by Titian, Albrecht Durer, Peter Paul Rubens, Francisco Goya, Antonio Canova, Claude Monet and Giorgio Morandi, to the public in 1990.
The grounds outside Parma boast neoclassical and Empire-era furnishings tucked in curated gardens that include exotic plants, monumental trees and colorful and white peacocks that roam free. The foundation hosts a permanent collection of art and artifacts that spans the Renaissance period to contemporary art.
