Masters of the Art

Short of helping the thieves carry the booty to their car, Budapest's Fine Arts Museum seems to have done every thing possible to ensure the success of the heist. With apparent ease, robbers penetrated the museum's flimsy security last week and plundered its fine collection of old masters. Unhindered, they cut or lifted seven Italian paintings from their frames, then spirited them out of the building. Declared shaken Museum Director Klara Garas: "It is a catastrophe."

The robbers seemed to know their art: included were two works by the 16th century Venetian master Tintoretto, and Portrait of a Young Man, attributed to Raphael. By far the most important of the works, however, was Raphael's 1508 Mary with the Christ Child and Young John the Baptist, known as the Esterhazy Madonna after the Hungarian noble family that sold it to the state in 1872. A jewel of the collection, the Madonna gives rare insights into Raphael's compositional skills. Raphael Scholar James Beck of Columbia University estimates that it alone is worth between $1 million and $2 million, while the total value of the stolen works is as much as $7 million.

The caper seems to have been executed with simple cat-burglary techniques. Sometime after dark, the thieves climbed a repairmen's scaffold on the west side of the imposing, neoclassical building. After scaling a 20-ft. stone wall, they reached one of the windows to the old masters' gallery. It was not protected by bars, so the thieves merely cut a hole in the glass, opened the latch, and slipped inside. The burglar alarm, museum attendants later admitted, had been out of order for three weeks.

The intruders appear to have made sure that they would not be surprised by the team of night guards. One shift went off duty at 1:30 a.m. and, following a routine schedule, the replacement team did not reach the old masters' gallery until after 2 a.m., when the theft was discovered.

Based on telephone calls from people who either lived in the neighborhood or were in the vicinity between 1:30 and 2 a.m., the police said, they believed the suspects were two or three youths driving a car that might have belonged to a foreigner or was rented.

Ten thousand policemen fanned out in a nationwide search, but in all likelihood the culprits had already escaped to Yugoslavia or Austria, both just 2 1/2 hours from Budapest by car. Although the fame of the paintings will make them all but impossible to sell publicly, some unscrupulous private collectors may relish acquiring them clandestinely. Authorities have already described the loss to Hungary's cultural heritage as "incalculable." The same term might apply to the negligence of the museum. Officials admitted last week that the poorly guarded paintings had not even been insured against theft. This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.