Still Life With Cherries And Peaches, 1885-1887. Found in the collection of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. (Photo by Fine Art Images/Heritage Images/Getty Images)

Heritage Images/Getty Images

On the night of March 22 to 23, 12 miles from the northern Italian city of Parma, four masked men threaded their way through the stately, exquisitely groomed gardens of the imposing the Villa dei Capolavori (The Villa Of Masterworks) in Mamiano di Traversetolo. They easily broke through the main door of the imposing stately, neo-baroque house, now a museum housing the works belonging to the Fondazione Magnani Rocco, made their way to the first-floor French Room gallery and with rather pinpoint targeting of selected masterpieces, removed Paul Cezanne’s “Nature morte au plat de Cerises” (“Still Life with a Plate of Cherries”), Henri Matisse’s “Odalisque sur la Terrasse,” (“Odalisque on the Terrace”) and Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s “Les Poissons,” or “The Fish.” The paintings are collectively valued at some $10.3 million, according to the foundation, but this seems a somewhat conservative estimate. Renoir’s “Les Poissons” alone is thought to bear a value of nearly $7 million.

The Bologna branch of the special carabinieri unit mandated with art theft, the Comando Carabinieri per la Tutela del Patrimonio Culturale, the Caribinieri Command for the Protection of the Cultural Patrimony, is leading the current investigation. For their purposes, apparently, the carabinieri delayed the announcement of the theft until Sunday, March 29, some six days from the event. The sensuous works of the ground-breaking impressionist Renoir turn out to be popular in Italy, both among collectors and a certain discerning class of thieves. Pictured below, a famous Renoir nude, stolen in 1975 from a private owner in Italy, on display in Rome after its recovery by the carabinieri’s art theft comando in 2008.

Italian Carabinieri stand next to the painting “naked woman” by Pierre-Auguste Renoir during a press conference on September 26, 2008 in Rome. The painting, stolen from an Italian family in 1975, was recently recovered. AFP PHOTO/Tiziana Fabi (Photo credit should read TIZIANA FABI/AFP via Getty Images)

AFP via Getty Images

Back in the stately gardens of the Villa of Masterpieces on the night of March 22 to 23, the Magnani-Rocca Foundation’s flock of free-range peacocks did not raise alarm from their elevated roosts as the thieves worked under them through grounds to the villa’s front door. But after a couple of minutes, the house alarms, which had not been disabled, did engage, and it’s considered that the swift response of the carabinieri in that moment gave the masked rapscallions cause to edit their plans. The working theory is, this prevented more masterpieces of the Villa of Masterpieces from walking out with them.

There will be much more to come on this curious aspect of the job, but for the moment it’s remarkable that, for an operation requiring as much rather painstaking choreography as this one apparently did, no defensive plans seem to have been made by the perpetrators for disabling of alarm systems, including cameras. Which is how we know that they were masked and is why the carabinieri have developed, and announced, a relatively dependable itinerary that the thieves followed once inside.

Regarded purely as a matter of style, then, the absence of any electronic or technical defensive actions on the part of the thieves bears just a whiff of the foolhardy, but very fast, way of working as seen in larger-scale smash-and-grab jewel thefts authored by European gangs from Albania and the former Yugoslavia. Their working theory was: Alarm systems don’t matter, because by definition we have no time.

But the theft of fine art, specifically, the art produced by easily-recognizable masters of this or that period, remains a curious endeavor, and at great odds with the Pink Panther gang’s focus on mere bling.

The closest in form and style to the current Villa of the Masterworks job are the exploits of the Serbia-born French burglar Vjeran “Spider-Man” Tomic, pictured outside his trial below, who was sentenced to eight years in February 2017 for stealing some $500 million in modern masterpieces, among them paintings by Matisse, Braque, Picasso and others from Paris’ Museum of Modern Art in 2010. Spider-Man Tomic did, however, make a point of exploiting an already-faulty alarm system in that event. Those masterworks have never been found, which conceivably contributed to the relatively light sentences he and his accomplices received in 2017.

Vjeran Tomic, the main suspect in the case of the 2010 theft of five masterpieces from the Paris Modern Art Museum, arrives to his trial on January 30, 2017 at the Court house in Paris. Three people are on trial over the 2010 theft of five masterpieces of Picasso, Matisse, Modigliani, Braque and Leger from the Paris Modern Art Museum. (Photo by BERTRAND GUAY / AFP) (Photo by BERTRAND GUAY/AFP via Getty Images)

AFP via Getty Images

Put another way, the brash “Spider-Man” didn’t let his jail time prevent him from participating in a—yep, such is the reach of the streaming giants—Netflix documentary about the spectacular heist in 2023, as he was still inside. At this early point it’s still a fair hope that, if and when the Villa of Masterpieces ring is rolled up by the carabinieri, somewhat heftier prison sentences can be meted out and the art can be found.