The 38 years of the life of the Italian, nicknamed Caravaggio, were very stormy - it included the death of his father from the plague, and life from hand to mouth with spending the night on Roman streets, gambling, murder, and a death sentence. Then the flight to Malta, the entry into the Order of the Hospitallers and expulsion from it, a new flight, a fight that disfigured the face, prison and death under unexplained 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 examined the archives of the workshop of Simone Peterzano, with whom Caravaggio studied from 1584 to 1588. Scientists were convinced 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 characteristics, and then digitize and enter into a computer. With the help of computer technology, the Italians were able to identify the similarities of the plots, faces and figures of some of the sketches with the later paintings of Caravaggio. In total, there were 83 such student drawings, later used by the master. Of course, such a large archive of the artist's newly discovered works is of value not only for historians and art critics. Experts have already made a preliminary estimate of the auction value of everything found and named a gigantic amount - about 700 million euros.
This is not the first such discovery of paintings by Caravaggio - in the stormy life of the great Italian there were many canvases, the trace of which has been lost. Relatively recently, in 2007, the Englishman Denis Meyhon, after several examinations, found out that the painting by an unnamed artist, which he acquired at the Sotheby's auction, was in fact a previously unknown work of Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio.
The great Italian is considered the ancestor 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 directions of painting in his time - mannerism and academism. And contemporaries called Caravaggio himself a reckless rude, nevertheless enjoying life in all its manifestations.
