To follow the trail of one of art history’s most enduring mysteries, you must leave behind the sunlight along Messina’s waterfront and head up Viale Giostra toward the mountains, following a valley once carved by a river. To reach a place known as Ritiro, you pass beneath a massive highway interchange and enter the Giostra neighborhood, a suburb built to house people left homeless by the 1908 earthquake. Decades of neglect have left the area struggling to reclaim its future.

It is here, amid crumbling stone walls, that the mystery lies hidden. Beneath these ruins, some believe, may lie the tomb of Antonello da Messina, the groundbreaking 15th-century painter who bridged North and South, blending the light and exquisite detail of Flemish painting with the monumentality and spatial depth of the Italian Renaissance.

Antonello is elusive. You pursue him, but he always slips away. He is a ghost moving through history, leaving masterpieces in his wake but no clear record of his appearance. His works speak for him: the quiet wonder of the Annunciata; the sly smile of the Portrait of an Unknown Man, whose eyes meet ours as if questioning us, challenging us to solve the mystery of their creator.

His name was Antonio di Giovanni de Antonio. We do not know precisely when he was born or when he died, or where he was buried. Both ends of his life are shrouded in darkness. In between lies a biography riddled with doubts and conjecture: journeys, relocations and commissions. About 35 works survive, now held in collections across Italy, Europe and the United States.

That number must be reduced by four paintings stolen on the night of Aug. 15, 2026, from the MuMe, Messina’s regional museum. The heist was astonishing: night watchmen were on duty but unable to prevent the theft, and the alarm was switched off while it was sounding. Under the worst possible circumstances, the robbery has once again drawn attention to Antonello’s life and work.

His story is best told backward, beginning on Feb. 14, 1479, when the artist dictated his last will and testament to notary Antonio Mangianti. The document describes him as sanus mente, licet corpore languens — sound of mind, though physically weakened by illness. He would die soon afterward, but the exact date remains unknown.

“Let my body be buried in the convent of Santa Maria di Gesù, wearing the habit of that convent,” he wrote in the Latin document. The sentence has puzzled scholars and fueled bitter disputes ever since the sensational discovery of his will on March 7, 1903.

At the heart of the controversy is a deceptively simple question: Which convent of Santa Maria di Gesù did Antonello mean? The upper convent at Ritiro, whose ruins can still be explored in search of an answer? Or the lower convent, built farther down the valley beginning in 1463 and destroyed in the 1908 earthquake, on the site where the Luigi Boer school now stands?

For years, generations of professors, art historians, archivists and archival sleuths have pursued the answer. Experts from Messina’s Forensic Police Unit have joined the search, along with what might be called “bone hunters.” All are looking for the decisive evidence that could finally settle the matter.

The task is daunting. The terse will, opened on May 11, 1479, states that Antonello wished to be buried in a common grave, without a plague or monument, wearing the habit of the Observant Franciscans, whose Third Order he belonged to. He also wanted his funeral to be conducted in absolute silence. He requested that “no member of the clergy, whether from the main church of Messina or any other church, and especially not the Conventual Franciscans, attend my funeral, except for the clergy and monks of the aforementioned convent of Santa Maria di Gesù.”

So how could any remains be identified as his?

The answer may lie in a sophisticated molecular archaeology protocol. Scientists plan to look for genetic matches among the skeletons found together in the same burial pit, on the assumption that the grave may also contain the remains of Antonello’s son, Jacobello, and his nephews Antonello and Pietro de Saliba.

Identifying a shared biological profile among the father, son and nephews would help establish the identity of the family group. Researchers also intend to use Y-chromosome genealogy, tracing paternal ancestry through DNA samples collected from living men who share the relevant family lineage. The technique has been used successfully in England to identify the remains of King Richard III.

It will be like searching for a needle in a haystack. The D’Antoni family no longer lives in Messina, and the trail of the Antonellos leads to northern Italy. The prospects are better for the de Saliba family, whose presence in the city and surrounding area is well documented and whose members are considered the strongest candidates for establishing the family’s genetic lineage.

The mystery is irresistible, with twists worthy of a detective story. Until 1903, when Antonello’s will was discovered, the accepted account held that he was buried in Venice, where he spent time between 1474 and 1476, one of the few journeys in his life documented by historians. Sicilian scholars had challenged the idea since the 17th century, arguing that his tomb could not possibly be in Venice. Their objections were dismissed as provincial bias. Who were they to contradict Giorgio Vasari, the father of art history, who had stated otherwise in his Lives of the Artists?

“Antonello (…) went to Venice, where being a man much given to pleasures and wholly devoted to sensuality, he decided to settle permanently and end his life there, having found a way of living entirely suited to his tastes.”

Today, Vasari’s account might be dismissed as a monumental piece of misinformation. Far from spending his final years in the Venetian lagoon in the libertine fashion Vasari described, Antonello appears to have spent his final days gravely ill in Messina, preparing for a death as humble and unassuming as he could make it.

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