Naples is sadly famous for the high number of stolen works of art. Following the earthquake of the 23rd of November 1980, many churches were closed and able thieves stripped many altars of their paintings and marble decorations, small-scale bronzes and other furnishings.
The Benedictine church of Santa Patrizia was particularly devastated. The lavish tabernacle by Cosimo Fanzago (1591-1678) – the foremost artist of Baroque Naples – was also looted by thieves, who stole most of its semi-precious stones and all of the gilt-bronze statuettes. In 1982 the tabernacle was transferred to the Museo di Capodimonte, where it was restored, and then displayed devoid of its sculptural decoration.
This article chronicles the recovery of three of the tabernacle's stolen gilt bronze statuettes. Representing the Virtues, the statuettes were recognized not in a foreign museum or a private collection, but on display at the Museo Civico Amedeo Lia in La Spezia, where they had a generic attribution to the School of Guglielmo della Porta – an attribution proposed by Charles Avery in the catalogue of the museum's bronze and metalwork collection published in 1998. The Virtues are instead the first remarkable examples of Fanzago's mastery in casting bronze. Thanks to the joint efforts of the Nucleo Carabinieri per la Tutela Culturale di Napoli and the Soprintendenza per i Beni Storico Artistici ed Etnoantropologici e il Polo Museale della Città di Napoli, the statuettes were retrieved and reinstalled on the tabernacle at the Museo di Capodimonte in February 2014.