Double Dutch!
£2.5m Flemish masterpiece faked by cops to thwart heist
IT was shaping up to be a good day at the office for one ambitious gang of thieves.
After breaking into an Italian church and smashing through a display case, they made off with what they thought was a £2.5million masterpiece.
But in a deception to rival any heist movie, police later revealed a minor hitch in their cunning plan – their 17th-century painting by Pieter Brueghel the Younger is a fake.
Detectives in the town of Castelnuovo Magra, Liguria, caught wind of the planned theft and switched the piece by the Flemish painter with a replica before the gang pounced.
In a fine art sting that will impress fans of the 1968 movie The Thomas Crown Affair, police had also secretly installed cameras at the Santa Maria Maddalena church – and are now studying footage to catch the culprits, who escaped in a white Peugeot.
Mayor Daniele Montebello, who was in on the ruse, initially told reporters that the stolen painting depicting the Crucifixion was ‘a work of inestimable value, a hard blow for our community’.
But he later revealed: ‘The original painting was replaced by a copy more than a month ago.
‘We were hearing rumours someone wanted to steal it, so the carabinieri (Italy’s paramilitary police) brought in the fake and installed security cameras.’ He also thanked church-goers who had ‘noticed the one on display was not the original, but did not reveal the secret’.
The bona fide Crucifixion – donated to the village church by a wealthy family in the 19th century – was successfully stolen nearly 40 years ago.
The 26in by 17in work, painted around 1617 in the Low Countries, was later found in the home of a criminal who had recently been released from prison.