A team of historians claim to have stumbled on 100 previously undiscovered early sketches by Caravaggio hidden in a castle in Milan – a cache they have valued at €718 million.
The sketches were found among 1,378 works in the archive of painter Simone Peterzano, who employed the teenage Michelangelo Merisi, known as Caravaggio, as an apprentice in his Lombardy studio between 1584 and 1588, before the young painter headed to Rome to win fame.
“We always felt it was impossible that Caravaggio left no record, no studies in the workshop of a painter as famous as his mentor,” Maurizio Bernardelli Curuz Guerrieri, artistic director for the Brescia Museum Foundation, told Italian news agency Ansa.
The sketches attributed to the artist, whose popularity has soared over the past century, will be published today in an ebook to be sold on Amazon.
Mr Bernardelli and fellow researcher Adriana Conconi Fedrigolli searched through Peterzano’s collection in Milan’s Castello Sforzesco after a two-year study of works by Caravaggio hanging in churches and museums in order to understand the geometric patterns the artist later favoured, particularly in his Roman period.
The team found what Mr Bernardelli called Caravaggio’s “structural DNA” standing out in sketches found at the castle, which is owned by the city of Milan.Of the
100 sketches attributed to the artist, 83 feature faces or parts of the body which he fully reprised in later paintings. – (Guardian service)