Posted on 01/10/2009 6:12:00 PM PST by nickcarraway
'Do you realise how much strength is needed to strangle a man?" asked Francesco Marino Mannoia. The magistrate listened carefully. "It can take as long as 10 minutes," Marino Mannoia went on, "and sometimes the victim slips out, bites and kicks. Some even manage to break free for a while. But at least it's a professional way of doing the job."
This witness was genuine, magistrate Giovanni Falcone decided after listening to such insights into life in the Sicilian mafia. He considered Marino Mannoia an exceptionally bright and honest pentito - the Italian term for a mafioso who turns informant - whose evidence was highly revealing about the wars within the organisation, the methods of its new rulers from the town of Corleone, and - most provocatively - its connections in high-level politics. The mafia confirmed in its own way how seriously it took Marino Mannoia by murdering, in reprisal for his "betrayal", his mother, aunt and sister. Today he lives in the US, in a witness protection programme. He has a new identity. And his strangest revelation hangs suspended in the records, too awful to be accepted by those it most interests.
The names that came up when Marino Mannoia took the witness stand in a Palermo courtroom in 1996 were mostly those you would expect. He spoke of Stefano Bontate, the mafia boss he worked for in the 1970s, and of Falcone, the revered investigating magistrate who, since they spoke, had been murdered with a car bomb. He talked more controversially of the accused man that day - Giulio Andreotti, several times prime minister of Italy, eventually found innocent of working with the mafia. But none of these names surprised anyone. Jaws did drop, however, when he got onto the subject of Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio.
Marino Mannoia was offering a solution to one of the most notorious art crimes in history, second only to the theft of the Mona Lisa in 1911. Caravaggio's nativity has not been seen since it vanished from the Oratory of San Lorenzo in Palermo almost 40 years ago.
The paintings that Caravaggio left on the island of Sicily at the start of the 17th century are stupendous masterpieces of popular art from which the power of his lost nativity can be judged: cavernous, eerie visions in the colours of fire and night. He came to the island in 1608, a fugitive who had been the most famous painter in Rome before he killed a man in a street fight and fled. In Sicily - then ruled by Spain - he moved about constantly, fearfully.
In Palermo, the island's capital, the wanderer discovered a meeting place of Mediterranean styles and faiths, where Byzantine, Gothic and Muslim artists had worked together in the middle ages. Caravaggio arrived during the birth of the Baroque revival that would ornament the streets with churches dripping with carved angels and saints. Among them is the Oratory of San Lorenzo, actually not a church at all but the meeting place of a pious lay brotherhood. Inside, benches line its walls as in a courtroom or meeting hall, where members of the Oratory would face each other to speak about their personal quests for divine grace. White sculpture flows in cascades of crisp drapery, tall windows let in pure daylight. At the altar end of the room is a raw rectangle of exposed wall; it was here that Caravaggio's last Sicilian painting hung until it was cut from its frame by thieves on the night of 18 October 1969.
Caravaggio's nativity is a vision of the first Christmas - but it is no Christmas card scene. It lacks cuteness, cosiness, even beauty. It is - or should we say was? - one of the most eerily lifelike and grimly imagined of all artistic attempts to conceive the birth of Christ in a stable. This is no picturesque, rustic building. We see it from the inside, as a dank, dark hovel whose rafters can be made out in the shadowy upper regions of the canvas. The people taking refuge in this place fit only for animals - the ox seems less a witness to Christ's coming than dumb evidence of the lowness and poverty of the setting - are truly outcast. Mary is a proletarian woman whose ragged clothes and sad face have nothing divine about them. Her baby lies on a thin mattress of straw on the hard earth. The painting's dominant colour is an earthen, worn-out brown. If there is the hope here of a new life, a redeemed world, it is a desperate hope only half-believed in by the poor who gather in a stable to see one more child born into a cruel world.
Palermo in the 1960s was scarcely more peaceful than in Caravaggio's day. The postwar era was a golden age for organised crime in southern Italy. In Sicily, where Christian Democrat governments relied on votes brokered by crooked politicians whose connections with the mafia were barely concealed, an unregulated, corrupt building explosion led to the growth of new concrete suburbs on the fringes of Palermo and the deliberate strangulation of the city's historic centre. Water was cut off to drive people out of their homes, historic buildings were casually demolished, bomb damage from 1943 went unrepaired. It is remembered as the "Sack of Palermo". Between 1951 and 1981 the population of Palermo's historic centre was reduced by more than two thirds while the entire population of the city doubled - parts of the old town were simply abandoned. It was grotesque. The Oratory of San Lorenzo, with its masterpiece by Caravaggio, was at the dark heart of the tragicomedy.
This year, the Oratory reopened with a restored interior, regular opening hours, a ticket office and postcard stall. But without the painting. This is the latest, quietly eloquent chapter in the city's four decades of mourning and pleading for the lost masterpiece. "We want to send out the message that it won't do any harm to give it back, and it might even do some good," said Riccardo Agnello, head of the Palermo branch of the Italian Environment Fund, when he launched a campaign to shame the thieves into surrendering their prize. The reopening of the Oratory is the most visible way to keep Caravaggio's painting in the city's memory. Will it finally persuade the criminals to return their prize - too big and famous ever to sell?...
The painting in question, valued at $20 million dollars.
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