The stolen masterpiece of Bruegel was reversed

The Italian police do not worry about the daring theft of a Flemish master's painting – because he had replaced it with a fake one month earlier.

The painting by Pieter Bruegel the Younger, worth millions of dollars, apparently disappeared from a church on Wednesday.

The thieves used a hammer to open his shop window and fled into a car.

A few hours later, the Italian police revealed that they had heard of the robbery attempt and installed cameras to detect thieves in the act.

The painting of the crucifixion had also been replaced by a copy, and the original kept safe, they said.

Everything happened in the town of Castelnuovo Magra in Liguria, where the crucifixion picture is kept in a side alcove of the church Santa Maria Maddalena.

The surveillance images of the raid are now the subject of careful study and investigators are suing the perpetrators.

Earlier, before the revelation of change, the mayor, Daniele Montebello, told the Italian news agency Ansa that the painting was "an invaluable work, a blow to our community."

On Wednesday night he revealed that he was in the trap, explaining that "today, for investigative reasons, we can not reveal anything".

He also thanked church members for their peacekeeping – "because worshipers have noticed that the one presented was not the original, but did not reveal the secret".

Pieter Bruegel the Younger was the son of another Flemish artist – Pieter Bruegel the Elder – and is famous for his own paintings and prints that he made of his father's work.

The Crucifixion is a well-known piece of which there are several copies, with slight differences between them, including one at the Museum of Fine Arts in Budapest, Hungary.

It is thought that all are variations of an original Bruegel the Old – but no original of his hand is known for his survival.