The Italian artist Caravaggio was born on September 29, 1571 in Milan, and died on July 18, 1610 in the town of Grosseto. In Milan, the creative biography of the master also began, but little was known to his biographers and art historians about this period. However, in the summer of 2012, the list of works by Caravaggio relating to the student period was replenished with almost a hundred found works.
Two Italian scientists - Maurizio Bernardelli Curuz Guerrieri and Adriana Conconi Fedrigolli - studied materials from the workshop of the artist Simone Peterzano in Sforza Castle, located north of Milan, for two years. From 1584, for four years, Michelangelo Merisi, better known by his nickname Caravaggio (the name of the artist’s mother’s hometown), studied at this workshop. Italian art historians set a goal to find among almost a thousand works by Simone Peterzano and his students those that belonged to Caravaggio. To do this, they divided the sketches and paintings into groups that differ in style, one of which corresponded to the style of the Roman period of the great Italian. Then, using computer technology, pencil drawings were compared with the artist’s famous canvases and 83 works were found among them, fragments of which were largely repeated.
The comparison was made with the Roman period because it was there that Caravaggio appeared four years after the sudden termination of training in the Milan workshop. There is no information about the reasons for the early departure from the teacher and the life of the Italian in these years, but in Rome he appeared poor and hungry, although his mother was the daughter of a wealthy cattle farmer, and his father was the manager in the castle of the Marquis of Sforza. The first time in Rome, he made a living doing drawings of flowers and fruits in the studio of not the most talented artist Cesare d'Arpino. But later, plots began to appear in his paintings, preliminary drafts of fragments of which Italian art historians now found in the archives of the Milan castle. In early July 2012, they presented the results of their work to the general public, publishing in four languages a 600-page brochure with illustrations showing the similarity of the found drawings with the famous works of Caravaggio.
