Thieves steal Da Vinci painting

A £50million Leonardo da Vinci painting has been stolen in a daylight raid on a remote Scottish castle.

The masterpiece, Madonna With The Yarnwinder, was taken today from Drumlanrig Castle, at 11am.

Police forces across Britain, including Scotland Yard's art squad, are already on the lookout for the gang responsible, who were believed to have fled the scene in a Golf GTi.

The castle is home to one of Scotland's richest landowners and contains one of the finest art collections in the UK.

The estate, in Dumfries and Galloway, is owned by the Duke of Buccleuch and houses masterpieces by da Vinci, Rembrandt and Holbein, among others.

Detectives leading the hunt said they were looking for four men seen driving near the castle in a white Volkswagen Golf Gti.

The original work is dated at 1501 by a letter from April of that year mentioning that Leonardo is working on Madonna Of The Yarnwinder.

Evening Standard art critic Brian Sewell said: "It is an appalling loss to the national heritage. The picture is so well-known that it will be impossible to sell. Unless the thieves look after it very carefully, as a painting on panel it is likely to sustain much more casual damage than a painting on canvas from changes in humidity and temperature."

Johnny Buccleuch, 80, who owns 247,000 acres and three historic houses in Scotland and England, is so attached to the painting that he regularly carried it with him between his homes - he spends four months in each.

In a wheelchair following a hunting accident 30 years ago, the Duke (then the Earl of Dalkeith) was expected by King George VI to marry his younger daughter Princess Margaret, but the king's death put an end to the matter and he married the daughter of a QC.

One of the most interesting sketches Leonardo ever did was for this painting, which is also sometimes called Madonna Of The Spindle or Madonna With The Distaff. An excellent red chalk drawing of the Madonna's head and shoulders also exists in the Royal Collection at Windsor Castle.

This work, intended for Florimond Robertet, Secretary to the King of France, shows the winder as shaped like a cross; this symbolises the Passion of Christ and His future death.

For a long time the painting was thought to have been lost somewhere in France and, after occasional doubts about its authenticity, the great authority, Kenneth Clark (later Lord Clark), in his later years, came to regard the figures and the foreground rocks as being Leonardo's own work.

This reinforced the opinion of other experts, notably Cecil Gould, a former director of the National Gallery in London and in 1986, more scientific evidence of authenticity was gathered by Professor Martin Kemp using electro-spectography in the laboratories of the National Gallery of Scotland.

Apart from the car, police also released descriptions of two men seen near the castle, which is about 17 miles north of Dumfries, at the time of the theft.

One was in his early forties, 5ft 10in, clean-shaven and of slim build.

He was wearing brown shoes, cream trousers with a black belt, a brown nubuck leather jacket and a brown baseball cap.

The other was in his late forties, 5ft 10-11in, of slim build and cleanshaven. He was wearing black trousers and a light-cream widebrimmed hat.