Church of San Francisco

This guide to the Church and Convent of San Francisco in Santiago turns on Sunday, October 7, 2012, the feast of Saint Francis, when a downpour packed the museum with strangers and two men worked quietly inside it. It follows the small seventeenth-century painting they targeted and the museum director's own admission that the convent, self-funded and unstate-backed, had almost no budget to guard what it owned. The building has already outlasted fifteen earthquakes above magnitude seven since its founding, and its coffered ceiling was raised with indigenous labor almost four centuries ago.