Two stolen paintings on their way home to Peru

SAN ANTONIO - A pair of Colonial-era religious paintings stolen from a church in Peru more than a decade ago and illegally brought to the U.S. have been officially returned.

The paintings, of St. Vincent Ferrer and St. Anthony Abbot, were returned to the Peruvian government during a ceremony Wednesday morning at the San Antonio Museum of Art.

The thieves who stole the artwork in 2001 never have been caught, and the whereabouts of the paintings were unknown until 2009.

That's when agents from Homeland Security Investigations' Austin office received a tip from an art collector who suspected several paintings scheduled to be sold by the Austin Auction Co. might have been stolen.

They had been. Investigators determined the paintings had been taken from Templo Santa Maria Magdalena, a church in Taray, Peru. From the Colonial-era Cuzco school of art, they're estimated to be worth $10,000 each.

'Spirit of our nation'

But the paintings are worth more than that, said Alberto Massa, consul general of the Peruvian consulate in Houston.

"They are part of the spirit of our nation," he told those in attendance at the museum.

He said the paintings eventually will be returned to the church from which they were stolen.

Two other paintings stolen at the same time, and eventually purchased by two different collectors in San Antonio, previously were returned in a Washington ceremony in 2012. Officials did not disclose the collectors' names. Efforts to contact the San Antonio collectors were unsuccessful.

Because the oil-on-canvas paintings are unsigned, the artist or artists who created them will remain forever unknown.

"These were crafts people who worked in service to the church," SAMA director Katie Luber said.

She said works from the Cuzco school are primarily devotional in nature, with highly embellished surfaces that would have seemed to flicker in the candlelight of an 18th-century church.

The ceremony was attended by law enforcement and government officials, including members of several Peruvian social and cultural organizations.

Ripped from church

In October 2001, unknown thieves ripped the two paintings from the upper-left and upper-right niches of the church's main altar. It's not known when and how the artwork was brought to the U.S., but all four paintings were sold at auction March 7, 2009.

Carlos De La Puente, who used the auction house to sell the paintings, allegedly received them from family members, special agent Janice Ayala said. The California collector who bought them at auction, apparently in good faith, eventually forfeited them to authorities.

The two paintings returned earlier, known as St. Ignacio of Loyola and Virgin of Candlemas, also were forfeited by their San Antonio owners.

To date, no charges have been filed against anyone in relation to the thefts, either here or in Peru.

The returning of the paintings is part of a larger effort by many countries to return significant cultural artifacts to their country of origin.