The Italian artist Caravaggio was born on September 29, 1571 in Milan, and died on July 18, 1610 in the town of Grosseto. The creative biography of the master also began in Milan, but his biographers and art critics knew little about this period. However, in the summer of 2012, the list of works by Caravaggio belonging to the student period was replenished with almost a hundred works found.
Two Italian scientists - Maurizio Bernardelli Curuz Guerrieri and Adriana Conconi Fedrigolli - spent two years researching materials left from the studio of the artist Simone Peterzano in the Sforza castle, located north of Milan. Since 1584, Michelangelo Merisi, better known by his nickname - Caravaggio (the name of the artist's mother's hometown) studied in this workshop for four years. Italian art critics set themselves the goal of finding among the nearly a thousand works of Simone Peterzano himself 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, the pencil drawings were compared with the famous canvases of the artist and among them 83 works were identified, 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 his studies in the Milan workshop. There is no information about the reasons for the early departure from the teacher and the life of the Italian during these years, but in Rome he appeared beggar and hungry, although his mother was the daughter of a wealthy cattle dealer, and his father was the manager of the castle of the Marquis of Sforza. At first, in Rome, he made a living doing drawings of flowers and fruits in the studio of the not most talented artist Cesare d'Arpino. But later, plots began to appear in his paintings, preliminary sketches of fragments of which Italian art historians have 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 drawings found to the famous works of Caravaggio.
