• Masked thieves stole Renoir, Cézanne, and Matisse works worth $10 million in a shocking, three-minute heist in Parma.
• The targeted raid on Magnani Rocca Foundation’s French gallery was thwarted mid-operation by alarms, prompting swift police intervention and investigation.
• Incident highlights ongoing wave of European museum thefts, raising renewed concerns over security vulnerabilities.

Three Impressionist and modern masterpieces by Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Paul Cézanne, and Henri Matisse were stolen from a prestigious Italian collection earlier this month.

Four masked thieves carried out the shocking heist at the Magnani Rocca Foundation, a private collection near the northern Italian city of Parma, on the night of Sunday, March 22. Local authorities have launched an investigation after the gang made off with art worth an estimated €9 million ($10.3 million), according to the BBC.

Among the star pieces to be lost in the heist was Renoir’s Les Poissons (1917), thought to be worth some €6 million ($6.9 million). It is one of only a few paintings by the French artist in a permanent Italian collection. The other two are Still Life with Cherries (1890) by Cezanne and Odalisque on the Terrace (1922), an aquatint on paper by Matisse.

The break-in, which lasted just three minutes, saw the men force entry through the main door and target a gallery of French art on the building’s first floor. It is believed that the thieves were interrupted by the museum’s alarm system.

In a brief statement to Italian media, the foundation described the theft as “structured and organized.” The full plan, however, was “not completed” thanks to the swift intervention of the police.

The foundation did not respond to a request for further comment.

The theft, which was only made public on March 29, is being investigated by Italy’s Carabinieri and the local Cultural Heritage Protection Unit of Bologna.

Museums in Europe have experienced a spate of high-profile heists in recent years, with France hit hardest. As the art crime expert Christopher Marinello noted after the brazen daylight theft of French crown jewels from the Louvre in Paris last October, however, these professional gangs tend to target treasures, like gold, that are more easily disguised and resold.

“Nobody wants to admit that Europe has a crime problem,” he claimed, as various security lapses that made the Louvre vulnerable to theft were brought to light.

But James Ratcliffe of the Art Loss Register, which has registered the stolen works in its database, believes this latest Italian heist should be viewed in a different light from the Louvre incident.

“The pictures stolen only have value if they are kept intact as artworks. They have no financial value if destroyed in the way that the jewelry stolen in Paris would as gold and gems,” he said in a statement. “This means that if the thieves wish to somehow benefit financially from this theft they will need to sell the pictures as art, or perhaps try to ransom it back to its insurer if there was one. ”

The Magnani Rocca Foundation was founded in 1977 to care for the collection of the art historian Luigi Magnani. The foundation opened to the public in 1983, with its holdings ranging from Old Masters like Albrecht Dürer, Titian, and Goya to 20th-century gems by Giorgio Morandi and Giorgio de Chirico.