Madonna allattante

The museum dates this picture to 1555. The Virgin nurses the Child seated on a crescent moon, with a large glowing mandorla around her body and a halo at her head, a composition the museum describes as almost elementary, brought to life by its curves. It has been in the collection since 1911.

On 19 November 2015, at closing time and just before the alarm was switched on, three armed men walked into the museum. They overpowered a guard and a cashier, cut 17 paintings from their frames, this one among them, and drove off in a security guard's car. The canvases turned up in May 2016, wrapped in plastic bags, on a small island in the Dniester river, where Ukrainian border guards stopped an attempt to smuggle them into Moldova. A guard from the museum was later convicted of the robbery. That December the president of Ukraine handed the paintings back to Italy in Kyiv, and at first they went on show again in temporary wooden frames.