Caravaggio’s Nativity with St Francis and St Lawrence
A Caravaggio masterpiece stolen from a Palermo church 50 years ago and listed among FBI’s “most wanted” stolen artworks, was kept in the home of a powerful mafia boss, who sliced off a piece of the canvas in order to convince the Catholic church to make a deal for its return, according to previously unseen testimony from the priest who tried to recover it.
In an video interview filmed in 2001, but locked in a drawer and now revealed exclusively to the Guardian, the parish priest of the Oratory of San Lorenzo revealed astonishing details of the October 1969 theft of Merisi da Caravaggio’s Nativity With St Lawrence and St Francis.
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