Reports from Italy into the theft of several Antonello da Messina works from a Sicilian museum raise an intriguing possibility - that they were not so much stolen as kidnapped.

The Renaissance works, taken from a museum in Messina on Saturday, include the central panel from his Polyptych of Saint Gregory which was previously insured for around $116 million.

Their value and the worldwide attention focused on the crime make selling them incredibly difficult and some Italian commentators think they may have been "art-napped" to be used as a bargaining chip to obtain something in exchange for their return.

Enzo Caruso, the city's councillor for culture, has not ruled out the involvement of the Mafia telling journalists: "It’s possible they might try to blackmail the state itself in order to return them."

The height of an enormous statue of the Virgin Mary unveiled in a small Polish village on Saturday - taller than the 125-foot-high Christ the Redeemer statue in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

James Turrell's monumental immersive walk-in installation Shangri La will be among the exhibits when Sydney's Powerhouse Parramatta opens its doors on November 7.

The $641 million museum will open with five exhibitions including Task Eternal which is inspired by human dreams of flight and includes Turrell's work as well as loans from NASA, the Smithsonian and London's British Museum.

Among the more than 3,000 objects on view are a commission by South Korean artist Ayoung Kim and Bharti Kher's 22-foot-tall bronze sculpture The Tree of Life located at the museum's entrance.

Turrell's work envelops visitors in cycles of all-encompassing changing colors to mimic the disorienting feeling of flying in fog.

Anna Weyant's portrait of fashion designer Marc Jacobs graces the cover of Vanity Fair‘s 2026 Style issue.

The head and shoulders image, likened by the magazine to a mixture of a "Dutch Old Master" and a "photo ID", accompanied an interview where the New York-based designer was hooked up to a lie-detector machine and asked about his career.

Jacobs, whose fashion brand has been sold in a reported $850 million deal, told the magazine he had only ever been "a fashion victim" but that was not "a bad thing".

1 - A sculpture of murdered Spanish poet Federico Garcia Lorca was carried through the streets of Madrid yesterday to mark the 90th anniversary of his death. Lorca, a contemporary and friend of fellow artists including Luis Bunuel and Salvador Dali, was shot dead in the early days of the country's civil war in 1936 and his body has never been found.

2 - Howard Hodgkin's former studio in Bloomsbury, central London, is among hundreds of buildings included in this year's Open House festival. It allows visitors to see inside buildings not normally open to the public including the studio where the painter worked until his death in 2017.

3 - Boston's Museum of Science will open its new 10,000-square-foot performance and presentation space on October 10. Former New York mayor Mike Bloomberg donated $155 million to the William and Charlotte Bloomberg Public Science Common which is named after his parents.

4 - A new public artwork by Maya Lin, who designed Washington DC's Vietnam Veterans Memorial, will be unveiled at the University of Texas at Austin next April. The work, called Floating Landscape, will be illuminated at night with LED lights corresponding to constellations in the night sky on the day the university was founded on September 15, 1883.