The Work
Caravaggio's Nativity with Saints Francis and Lawrence, painted in 1609 for the Oratory of San Lorenzo in Palermo and stolen by the Sicilian Mafia in 1969, is among the most lamented lost masterpieces in Western art. From photographs and historical descriptions, the painting depicted the birth of Christ with Caravaggio's characteristic extreme tenebrism: the infant lies in straw in the foreground, the exhausted Virgin and the kneeling Joseph gathered with Saints Francis and Lawrence in profound darkness, the only illumination the supernatural light emanating from the child. An angel above stretches a scroll bearing the Gloria in Excelsis. The painting was executed during the most desperate period of Caravaggio's life - his flight from Malta after a violent altercation - and carries the weight of personal crisis.
Biblical Source
Luke 2:7 - 'She wrapped him in cloths and placed him in a manger, because there was no guest room available for them' - and the angels' hymn of Luke 2:14 - 'Glory to God in the highest heaven, and on earth peace to those on whom his favor rests' - provide the narrative basis. John 1:5 - 'The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it' - is the theological subtext of Caravaggio's tenebrism: the child who is light amid absolute darkness. Isaiah 9:6 provides the prophetic depth: 'For to us a child is born, to us a son is given.'
The Artist
Caravaggio painted the Palermo Nativity during his Sicilian sojourn of 1608-1609, when he was on the run from the Knights of Malta after being imprisoned for a serious assault. He had escaped from a Maltese prison by climbing down a rope from a castle wall into the sea. The Sicilian paintings - this Nativity, the Burial of Saint Lucy in Syracuse, and the Raising of Lazarus in Messina - were painted under extreme personal duress and show an intensification of darkness and spiritual desolation that scholars have connected to Caravaggio's own existential situation.
Iconography
The inclusion of Saint Francis and Saint Lawrence in the Nativity is unusual and significant. Francis, the saint of poverty and simplicity, connects the scene to the Franciscan tradition of the Christmas crib; Lawrence, the deacon martyred by being roasted on a gridiron, whose Oratory bore the painting, provides a devotional link to the specific patrons. The darkness surrounding the light of the child creates the theological atmosphere specific to Caravaggio's late career: the world as a place of danger and shadow into which the divine light enters fragile and unprotected.
Significance
The theft of the Palermo Nativity in October 1969 - cut from its frame in the Oratory of San Lorenzo by thieves working for the Sicilian Mafia - is one of the most significant losses in the history of art. Italian mafia informants have given inconsistent accounts of the painting's fate; some claim it was damaged in the theft and destroyed, others that it circulated in the criminal underworld for decades. It appears on Interpol's most-wanted stolen artworks list. The irony that the Nativity of the Prince of Peace was stolen by organized crime and that its whereabouts remain unknown gives the work an involuntary theological dimension that Caravaggio could not have intended but that John 1:5 makes eerily appropriate.
The theft of the Palermo Nativity has generated an extensive literature on the intersection of art, crime, and religious symbolism. The Sicilian Mafia's theft of a painting depicting the birth of the Prince of Peace, and its subsequent disappearance into the criminal underworld, has been read as an unintentional enactment of the darkness that surrounds the light of the Nativity in John 1:5: 'the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.' The thieves have, paradoxically, made the painting's theological claim more vivid: the light that John celebrates is surrounded by the very darkness that Caravaggio depicts -- straw, shadow, the midnight of poverty -- and the darkness that has seized this particular depiction of that light has not, ultimately, overcome it, because the image survives in photographs and copies and in the art-historical memory.
Caravaggio's Sicilian period (1608-1609) was the most psychologically intense of his career. Fleeing the consequences of his 1606 killing in Rome, he had accepted the hospitality of the Knights of Malta, received a knighthood, and then suffered a catastrophic fall from grace when he was imprisoned for a 'very great crime' -- likely another assault -- and escaped from the fort at La Valletta. He arrived in Sicily exhausted, wounded in spirit if not in body, and his Sicilian paintings -- the Burial of Saint Lucy, the Raising of Lazarus, and the Palermo Nativity -- all carry the marks of an artist confronting mortality, failure, and the possibility of grace in extremity.## Visiting Info
The Oratory of San Lorenzo in Palermo, where the painting hung for 360 years, is open to visitors. A photographic reproduction now occupies the space where the original hung. The oratory contains important stucco decorations by Giacomo Serpotta, which survived the theft and remain among the finest Baroque decorative interiors in Sicily. Palermo is served by the Falcone-Borsellino Airport. The city's historic center, including the Palazzo Abatellis (home to Antonello da Messina's Annunciate), the Oratory of San Lorenzo, and the Cathedral, can be visited in a full day.