The story
On the night of 10 May 1970, thieves shot out the light above the entrance of the Malaspina Picture Gallery in Pavia, got around the alarm and climbed in from a first-floor balcony. They left with three paintings. Two of them, a Madonna and Child by Giovanni Bellini, the Venetian master, and a small Holy Family long given to Correggio, were recovered by the carabinieri in 1974. The third, a Portrait of a Man by Antonello da Messina, turned up only in August 1977, in a suitcase left at the luggage office of Rome's Tiburtina station.
All three hang in Pavia again. The Holy Family still carries Correggio's name, though some scholars have suggested an anonymous Mantuan painter known as the Orombelli Master instead. The collection takes its name from Marquis Luigi Malaspina di Sannazzaro, a Pavia nobleman of the Enlightenment who died in 1835 and gathered pictures to found a public museum and a school of painting in his city. Since 1951 it has been shown in the Castello Visconteo, the brick castle the Visconti lords of Milan built in the 14th century, together with Pavia's other civic museums.
Its rooms cover the Lombard, Venetian, Emilian and Tuscan schools, with Northern works by Hugo van der Goes and Jean Clouet. Many visitors come for the Bottigella Altarpiece by the Lombard painter Vincenzo Foppa, and for the huge wooden model of Pavia Cathedral, begun in 1497 and displayed in one of the castle's tower rooms.
