Thief! Thief!

"The saint wears a brightly colored mantle. The painting . .. was torn from the wall of a gallery between three and three-fifteen this afternoon. . . . The matter is in the hands of the Police Department."

With this official statement Manhattan's vast Metropolitan Museum last week locked the barn door after the theft of a small but valuable ($3,000 to $5,000) picture. Stolen from the Metropolitan's walls was an 11 1/2 by 8 3/8 in. tempera painting of St. Thomas the Apostle, attributed by experts to Simone Martini, a 14th-Century Italian painter of the Sienese School.*

At 3 o'clock the scene in Gallery E 15, where the famed Maitland F. Griggs Italian paintings hung on special exhibition, was serenely normal: gallerygoers quietly strolled over the cork floor, paused, peered at small pictures invisibly screwed to the walls. At 3:15, a uniformed guard made his routine round of inspection. His eyes widened in horror: only screw holes marked the spot where Simone's St. Thomas had hung. He rushed to his superior. No gong clanged, no revolvers flashed from holsters. People leaving the museum were closely scrutinized. (Frisking or detaining on suspicion on such occasions is not cricket.) But no departing visitor had a suspicious bulge. At 5 o'clock, in an atmosphere of tense frustration, the museum closed its massive doors. At week's end, Metropolitan Director Francis Henry Taylor, having issued 950 handbills describing the stolen picture for art dealers, police, and other museums, left for Chicago to attend a meeting of museum directors.

The theft was only the third from the Metropolitan since it opened its doors in 1872. Last theft was in 1927 when three miniatures were stolen. The pictures were later found stuffed down a drain-- minus their gold frames. Thefts of art works from museums are rare, because such goods are virtually unmarketable. Most museum thieves are psychopaths or fanatical art-lovers. Among recent U.S. art robberies, most sensational was the Brooklyn Museum's loss of ten old masters at one blow, in 1933. The Brooklyn thieves hid in the museum until late at night, skillfully lowered the paintings and themselves to the street by a rope. Four of the paintings were recovered, but the thieves were never found.

*Simone Martini, or Memmi, was reputedly a pupil of Giotto. He is best known for his Annunciation triptych in the Uffizi Gallery at Florence.

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