38 years of the Italian life, nicknamed Caravaggio, went very violently - it included the death of the father from the plague, and starvation with spending the night on Roman streets, gambling, murder, the death sentence. Then flight to Malta, entry into the Order of the Hospitallers and expulsion from it, a new flight, a fight that disfigured a person, prison and death in obscure circumstances. But in the history of world art, he is known not at all for the riot of life, but for his brilliant canvases, the number of which has recently replenished by almost a hundred.
Italian historians and art historians explored the archives of the workshop of Simone Peterzano, from whom Caravaggio studied from 1584 to 1588. Scientists were sure that among them should be the student works of the great artist, whose full name is Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio. They had to examine more than a thousand works in order to divide them into several groups according to stylistic features, and then digitize and enter them into a computer. Using computer technology, the Italians managed to identify the similarity of the plots, faces and figures of some sketches with later paintings by Caravaggio. There were 83 such student drawings later used by the master. Of course, such a large archive of newly discovered works by the artist is valuable not only for historians and art historians. Experts have already made a preliminary assessment of the auction value of all found and called a gigantic amount - approximately 700 million euros.
This is not the first such discovery of Caravaggio's paintings - in the hectic life of the great Italian, there were many paintings, a trace of which was lost. Relatively recently, in 2007, the Englishman Denis Mayhon, after several examinations, found out that the canvas of an unnamed artist acquired by him at the Sotheby's auction was in fact a previously unknown work of Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio.
The great Italian is considered the founder of a new trend in European painting of the 16th-17th centuries, a distinctive feature of which is realism and simplicity of composition. He is even called a reformer and a rebel against the dominant areas of painting in his time - mannerism and academism. And Caravaggio himself was called by his contemporaries a reckless snapper, nevertheless rejoicing in life in all its manifestations.
