On the eve of Italy's most sacred summer holiday, thieves slipped through the silenced halls of a Sicilian museum and removed four paintings that had survived five centuries of history — works by Antonello da Messina, whose devotional art had only recently commanded nearly fifteen million dollars at auction. The theft from Messina's MuMe museum during Ferragosto speaks to something older than crime: the human impulse to possess what belongs to all of us. Yet the very greatness of what was taken may become the thieves' own trap, as masterpieces too famous to sell drift into the shadowy economie