Two Lost Caravaggios Surface in Two Days, Scholars Say

Two Italian researchers announced the discovery of two long-lost Caravaggio paintings within two days of each other, each presenting the find as an early work by the Baroque master — and each, for now, resting on unpublished evidence.

The first claim came from historian Gianni Papi, who declared a dark portrait of a young man to be by Caravaggio. The canvas had been attributed to the 16th-century Tuscan school and sold at the Dorotheum auction house in Vienna in 2017 for €3,810 ($4,300).

Papi announced his hypothesis on November 7 during a conference at the Pinacoteca Civica in Montepulciano, according to the Italian art news outlet Finestre sull'Arte. He declined to comment further until the conference proceedings are published. Until that publication, the attribution cannot be tested by other scholars.

Papi is no stranger to bold Caravaggio claims. Last year, he said he had identified the earliest known painting by the artist: a depiction of a boy peeling fruit, thought to date from 1592–93, when Caravaggio was around 20 years old.

What is the second painting?

The second find, announced the following day, is Maria Cristina Terzaghi's identification of Caravaggio's Young Man with a Vase of Roses in a private collection in France. Terzaghi co-curated the blockbuster Caravaggio exhibition held last year at Rome's Palazzo Barberini.

She told Italy's La Repubblica that the composition was previously known only through copies and a description by the painter Giovanni Baglione, Caravaggio's contemporary. In the Barberini exhibition catalogue, Terzaghi had already noted the composition's similarities to another early Caravaggio, The Boy Bitten by a Green Lizard (1593–94), which exists in two versions believed to be authentic.

Where the bitten boy recoils in shock, Terzaghi wrote, the subject of Young Man with a Vase of Roses appears serene, perhaps even sorrowful.

Terzaghi said she chanced upon the original at the back of a Paris gallery some years ago and recognized it immediately. What distinguishes this version from the copies, she told La Repubblica, is its "exceptional" quality — above all "in the boy's extraordinary face, his moist eyes, the iridescent whites of his shirt, and the marvelous still life." These features "leave no doubt as to the painting's authenticity," she said. She now dates the work to around 1596–97.

What does the provenance show?

The documentary trail is unusually strong. Records show the painting once belonged to Cavalier d'Arpino, a painter in whose workshop Caravaggio worked around 1596. His collection was seized in 1607 in exchange for his freedom during a criminal trial for grievous bodily harm. Pope Paul V then passed it to his nephew, Cardinal Scipione Borghese, and it remained in the Borghese collection until at least 1831.

The canvas was auctioned in Paris in 1909. How and why it traveled from Italy to France remains unknown — a gap the new research has not yet filled.

What does this change for Caravaggio scholarship?

For now, little is settled. Neither attribution has appeared in a peer-reviewed publication, and Papi's findings will only be assessable once the Montepulciano conference proceedings appear. Terzaghi's case leans on connoisseurship and a documented Borghese provenance; Papi has offered no public evidence yet at all.

If both attributions hold, the count of early Caravaggios — the artist died in 1610 and fewer than 80 works are generally accepted — would grow by two within a single week, reshaping the picture of his formative years in the mid-1590s. The Vienna buyer's €3,810 canvas would also become one of the sharpest bargains in recent auction memory.