It's horrible when a pessimistic hunch is confirmed. A year ago I wrote in the Guardian about Caravaggio's Nativity with Saints Francis and Lawrence, stolen from an oratory – the baroque catholic equivalent of a Quaker meeting house, where people gathered to pour out their hearts and souls – in Palermo in 1969.
The theft has always been attributed to the mafia, and for four decades, art lovers have hoped the painting might some day resurface from an underworld private museum. But going back to the records of a trial of a pentito – a mafia insider who becomes a state witness – I was sadly convinced by his account of how the gangsters who stole Caravaggio's work brutally mistreated it to destruction.
Now another pentito has given a slightly differing, but not incompatible, version of the same story. Yes, the mafia took the painting. But no, it was never hung in a godfather's private museum. It was violently used by violent men. The new account says the remains – mere scraps – were burned.
It has gone. We only have reproductions. As it happens, a compelling image of this work has just been published by Taschen, in an oversized Caravaggio volume that is like wandering though a darkened church, so large are the shadows. You look at the touching, simple scene Caravaggio created for Sicilians, and long to see the real painting.
But we probably never will.
