On the night of 18 October 1969, thieves broke into the Oratory of San Lorenzo, Palermo, and removed Caravaggio’s Nativity.
On the night of 18 October 1969, thieves broke into the Oratory of San Lorenzo, Palermo, and removed Caravaggio’s Nativity. The altarpiece has not been seen since. Three decades later, in 1996, Italians were aghast when the Mafia claimed responsibility. Somewhere in the Sicilian capital of Palermo, it seemed, a gangland capo sat in awed admiration of the stolen Christmas canvas. Far from submerging rivals in wet concrete, now the Cosa Nostra were enthusiasts of 17th century religious art.
Born in 1571 near Milan, Caravaggio was a flammable individual. Contemporaries remarked on his appetite for vendetta — what the Mafia would call the ‘balancing of accounts’. Everywhere he went he was preceded by an armed servant boy to fend off aggrieved card sharps, pimps and other low lifes. Yet, with magical veracity, Caravaggio transmuted this rough humanity into a revolutionary re-telling of the scriptures. Where the Renaissance saw the apostles draped in dignified folds and sandals, Caravaggio used tavern boys and barefoot prostitutes as his models. His astounding sensory realism was an assault on more or less everything that had gone before. The grubby saints of Caravaggio’s art glowed with such a photographic sharpness, indeed, that a sinister illusion was suspected.
Yet by the 19th century, Caravaggio’s name was dirt. John Ruskin put the painter among the ‘worshippers of the depraved’ for his sado-erotic distortions (as he saw them) of the Christian life. Even with their taste for brooding darkness, the Romantics were repelled by Caravaggio’s vengeful personality. In 1606, dreadfully, the artist murdered an opponent on a Rome tennis court. Allegedly there had been some quarrel over a foul call.
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