The city didn’t ask for rent, or payment for the utilities, but the museum received no other government support. Manfredi, an artist himself and a native of Casoria, called on friends and connections to gather a collection, which today includes more than a thousand works of art from as far away as China, Chile, New Zealand, and Burkina Faso. “I didn’t want to create an IKEA museum, with always the same 200 artists from the big galleries,” Manfredi says. “I wanted to create a museum that was dynamic, open to new trends, and to give … artists that don’t have a big market at their back a chance to express themselves and be inside a museum.” He kept the place open by begging favors and even selling his own artwork. But with the recession, his limited supply of local donors dried up, and he concluded that he could no longer afford to care for the works he had acquired.

Italy’s economic troubles have cut hard into both private and public funding for museums. In April, the Maxxi, Italy’s flagship contemporary-art museum, which opened to great fanfare in 2010, was taken over by the government, after auditors said they found a $1 million shortfall in the previous year’s budget. Across the country, theaters, archaeological parks, and other cultural institutions are feeling austerity’s pinch.

In despair, Manfredi decided to try to call attention to the peril facing Italian culture by turning his own collection into a flock of “sacrificial lambs.” He took pictures of the museum’s collection and sent photocopies—a brick 1,000 pages high—to Italy’s culture minister and to the president of the Campania region, around Naples. The package was a ransom note. If he didn’t receive assistance, he warned, he would set the pieces on fire, one by one. “It’s simple,” he told me. “If nobody cares about the art that’s inside the museum, then I’ll burn it.” In February, he started the burning with one of his own creations: a series of five life-size, full-body posters of Mafia fugitives, which had been displayed in the Italian pavilion of the 2011 Venice Biennale.

Stöfhas’s painting is the fifth work Manfredi has put to the torch, and the fourth in less than a week. Inside the museum hang the remains of a painting of a flower by the French artist Séverine Bourguignon: blackened crossbars, with fringes of canvas peeling back from the edge of the frame like flesh around a wound. Another work, a wood sculpture by an Italian artist named Rosaria Matarese, now consists of two chunks of carbonized wood, one impaled by a large blackened nail. Of the others, only ashes are left.

Before destroying a piece, Manfredi gets permission from the artist. Stöfhas is watching her painting burn via Skype from Germany; her face is visible on the screen of a laptop held aloft by one of the museum’s volunteers. The first part of the canvas to succumb to the flames is the figure on the left. A fissure opens where her shoulder had been. Then the fire rends a smaller hole in the painting’s upper-right corner. The stink of burning acrylic surges toward the photographers. Two boys of middle-school age approach from the side to get a better look. Other than the press, they are the only members of the public to show up.