Italian police recover Renoir, Cézanne and Matisse works stolen in March

Italian police have recovered three works by Paul Cézanne, Pierre-Auguste Renoir and Henri Matisse that were stolen in March from the Fondazione Magnani-Rocca outside Parma, the Carabinieri said Friday.

Officers from the Carabinieri’s Parma provincial command and its cultural heritage protection unit found the works during searches ordered by prosecutors, the police said in a statement. The investigation is ongoing.

The recovered works are Cézanne’s Still Life With Cherries, a pencil-and-watercolor drawing on paper valued at €6 million; Renoir’s 1917 painting Les Poissons, valued at about €3 million; and Matisse’s Odalisque on the Terrace, a color aquatint valued at €20,000.

Video footage of the theft released by the Carabinieri on social media on Friday shows ​two masked ​burglars entering through a window, snatching the artworks and fleeing the building.

The museum announced the recovery Friday on Facebook, writing that “beauty has won.”

“After nearly five months, the three works taken from the Villa of Masterpieces have been recovered thanks to the work of the Carabinieri, the Cultural Heritage Protection Unit and the Parma public prosecutor’s office,” the foundation said in the post, which was written in Italian. “Soon they will be able to return to where Luigi Magnani wanted them: before the eyes of all.”

The works were stolen overnight on March 22, when a group of hooded thieves raided the private museum in Traversetolo, Urgent Matter previously reported. The theft lasted about three minutes, and the thieves gave up on a fourth work after the museum’s alarm system activated.

The museum did not publicly acknowledge the theft for more than a week. A Carabinieri spokesperson told CNN at the time that the museum had chosen not to publicize it in hopes of catching the thieves if they returned.

Urgent Matter previously reported an estimated total value of about $10 million.

James Ratcliffe, general counsel and director of recoveries at the Art Loss Register, said in an emailed statement after the theft that selling stolen art worth millions on the legitimate market was “now almost impossible.” He said the stolen works had been registered to the register’s database of lost and stolen art.

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