He altered the course of Western art with a completely new approach to light and form, yet barely 50 works created by Caravaggio during his 38 years have survived. Now scholars claim that one more, a previously unknown painting, has been discovered in a private collection in Britain.
The oil on canvas depiction of Saint Augustine, an expressive, mature work dated to around 1600 – when he was 28 – is to appear in print for the first time in a book on Caravaggio produced by Yale University Press.
A leading scholar, Sebastian Schütze, professor of art history at the University of Vienna and one of the book's co-authors, called the work a significant discovery.
He said: "It has never been published. What looked like an anonymous 17th-century painting revealed its artistic qualities after restoration."
The painting fits in to Caravaggio's oeuvre around 1600, when his style was sculptural and monumental, with powerful movement and emotional expression.
Overlooked in a private collection, where it was considered the work of an anonymous hand, documentary evidence has now been unearthed to support the attribution.
Although covered in old varnishes and repaints, its potential was spotted by Clovis Whitfield, a British art historian and dealer with a track record in discovery.
The painting can be traced to one of Caravaggio's most powerful patrons in Rome, Vincenzo Giustiniani. A Saint Augustine of similar dimensions – 120cm by 99 cm – is recorded in his 1638 inventory.
Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (1571-1610) was a revolutionary among artists, revered by masters through the centuries for his radical use of light and dark – chiaroscuro – and the theatrical biblical narratives he painted directly from posed models.
One of the west's most innovative artists, his use of light was as innovative as the Renaissance development of perspective.
But his was a tempestuous life blighted by violence, brawls and trouble with the authorities. He killed a man, either over a woman or a tennis match, and died in mysterious circumstances, although scientists last year used carbon dating and DNA checks on his likely remains, excavated in Tuscany, and found extreme levels of lead poisoning, possibly from the lead in his paints.
Another leading Renaissance scholar, David Franklin, director of the Cleveland Museum of Art and co-author of the book, said the Saint Augustine discovery was important because it is totally new.
He said: "Even the composition had not been recorded in other copies. Often a [lost original] composition is known from copies but not this one."
He added: "What's interesting is that it's a rather conservative image. Maybe that's why it hadn't been known.
"It shows a side of Caravaggio perhaps that is not as drastic and antagonistic as usual but where he was working very closely with Giustiniani to try to create a much more quiet image of a saint."
He described the Giustiniani provenance as "compelling". The painting remained in the Giustiniani collection until sold in the mid 19th century.
It will appear in Caravaggio and His Followers in Rome, to be published next month by Yale University Press in association with the National Gallery of Canada.
Comments
19 June 2011 7:43PM
Is that a detail or the whole painting? Some annotation would be illuminating.
19 June 2011 8:03PM
this doesnt look anything like a Caravaggio.....
no chairoscuro, or contraposto
19 June 2011 9:09PM
That reminds me of a box we found in the attic at the Farmhouse in Welling. But there was nothing inside. We were very disappointed.
19 June 2011 9:11PM
Clovis Whitfield. What a lovely name! I will invite him to tea. Just so I can say, "Do you take sugar, Clovis?"
19 June 2011 9:35PM
Kate Bush- do you make the same remark on all the threads? Seems so
19 June 2011 10:19PM
It reminds me of Titus as a Monk,also painted in 1660, by Rembrandt. It is finer to my mind but the St Augustine is well executed and has a stillness which is attractive to this day.
Titus as a monk is on show at the Dulwich Picture gallery for June-July and is well worth seeing. http://www.rijksmuseum.nl/aria/aria_assets/SK-A-3138?lang=en
19 June 2011 11:03PM
It would be nice to see this uncropped, or at least with a link to an uncropped image of the painting...
19 June 2011 11:59PM
Entirely unconvincing. Wooden, inexpressive, no dramatic or affective content whatsoever, which would be unprecedented for Caravaggio (except for his very early genre paintings of cardsharps and the gypsy fortune teller). The tone and palette are also wrong.
Here is the uncropped painting (what is it with the Guardian and cropped paintings?)
Oh, and does it honestly look as if it's by the same artist who produced this St Matthew from the same period?
http://www.artbible.info/art/large/206.html
20 June 2011 12:40AM
Well, I'm prepared to be convinced. although it doesn't quite have the movement and writhing agony of some of his other works. And the face seems...not what I'd expect from the maestro. Still - it's a good story that got my pulse beating!
20 June 2011 2:29AM
Caravaggio. I don't think so.
20 June 2011 2:50AM
The painting is cropped because only cropped does it really look like a Caravaggio.
The background with the books looks very un-Caravaggio-like I must admit, though the skull in the darkness is more like it.
20 June 2011 4:33AM
The painting is unconvincing, despite the supposed provenance.
20 June 2011 5:36AM
The handling of the tonal values is incompetent. The drawing is incompetent. The colour is incompetent. Absolutely nothing about it looks like the work of a master, let alone Caravaggio. That scholars have made this blunder should not surprise us as anyone who has ever encountered the cack-handed 'Samson and Delilah' in the National Gallery, currently attributed - certainly erroneously - to Rubens, should appreciate.
20 June 2011 7:57AM
Unearthed? You mean the painting was discovered buried in the earth? Your headline is misleading.
20 June 2011 8:10AM
Well, I like it.
20 June 2011 8:18AM
Everything that is wrong with the world:
Guardian commentators:
Groan.
20 June 2011 8:26AM
My oh my, this is just embarrassing.
"The painting fits in to Caravaggio's oeuvre around 1600, when his style was sculptural and monumental, with powerful movement and emotional expression."
erm, no it doesn't, not even if he was drunk and blindfolded.... Look at any of his paintings from that 'ouvre', from Judith Beheading Holofernes 1598–1599, to Supper at Emmaus, 1601... and then compare it to this work which is more likely to have been created by a grade 10 student. Caravaggio would never have allowed himself to paint such sub-standard mediocrity.
20 June 2011 9:00AM
@naysayers
Not so. Follow the link to the full picture and take a look at the hand over the book. This is very delicately and very expertly done, and may have been the thing to alert the experts in the first place. One imagines the 'mature' Caravaggio, like others, mightn't have been arsed to apply the same degree of finish to the whole work.
20 June 2011 9:02AM
It seems to match the description in the link given by zibibbo (19 June 2011 11:59PM), and has the camera-obscura-esque-ities (accurate foreshortening etc.), but to my eyes doesn't look like the work of Caravaggio himself. Maybe the photographic reproduction's to blame, but the painting looks static, a bit washed out, and real Caravaggios don't need no stinkin' backgrounds.
20 June 2011 9:14AM
The trouble for some of those above might lie in layers of overpainting and clumsy restoration - unless this IS the restored version, in which case: I share their concerns ...
Even so: no photograph, however good, can give the same impression as seeing the painting in the flesh; so my untutored judgement in authenticating Caravaggios remains suspended.
Wouldn't be too surprising, though, if it were a copy.....
20 June 2011 9:19AM
Looks like someone else did the bookcase in the background.
20 June 2011 9:23AM
I like the compositional linking of the mitre, saint's head and skull.
20 June 2011 9:25AM
zibibbo
Everyone's a critic...
20 June 2011 10:50AM
I too am a little sceptical about this. I'm an art student who has studied a lot of Caravaggio and I don't think it feels like a Caravaggio, not even a bad one (and everybody has bad ones folks.) I don't think there is anything wrong with questioning the academics, but I recognised that their expertise is vastly superior to mine. I'd like to know a little bit more about their line of thought and about this patron, who seems to be key to the whole thing.
20 June 2011 11:07AM
LCraig
Quite so LCraig. But I wonder why the only other paper to cover this story, the Wall Street Journal, only reports it in the context of the painting being considered a hoax .
And I wonder why the Art Newspaper - the sharpest and most reliable art reporters on the block - have so far chosen to ignore the discovery.
In the meantime, why don't you use the evidence of your own eyes by looking at Caravaggio's other securely known paintings. Is there one that looks anything like this lifeless waxwork?
20 June 2011 11:12AM
People in here saying it's not really a Caravaggio...
How can you possibly tell from a photograph??
20 June 2011 11:27AM
i’m amazed that some of the contributors to this comment page can believe they can ascribe, or not, this painting to Caravaggio by examining a dodgy jpeg image!
20 June 2011 11:35AM
thelawofaverages
I agree the world would be a much nicer place if we could all just sit back and always confidently trust in the expert opinion of specialist academics. But the trouble is the experts don't always agree among themselves, especially when it comes to something as subjective as the attribution of a painting. See for example the ridicule heaped on Professor Martin Kemp by other equally renowned scholars for his recent new discovery of a 'Leonardo'.
Why we value Caravaggio at all is because his dramatic and expressive paintings speak to us directly and powerfully over hundreds of years whether we are experts or not. This picture of St Augustine is patently undramatic and inexpressive. That's what makes it suspicious. It would be unique in the entire output of Caravaggio's mature work for not having these qualities. Anyone who is moved by his work can see that. You don't have to be a professor.
20 June 2011 12:14PM
zibibbo
To be fair, google jpegs render everything with a marvelously dull lifeless sheen, which can't compare to seeing the real thing.
20 June 2011 1:05PM
Yeah, but what does John Gash think, I'd trust my old lecturer on this one all the way. For what its worth (19/20 in a Caravaggio exam at honours level), the figure looks not at all Caravaggesque, the tonality is wrong, and there is insufficient contrast between the figure and the space.
Looking at the whole picture, the hands are clearly inadequately depicted. As Art Historians know, painters can most often be told by their depictions of the extremeties and Physiogony, ie, faces, hands and feet. On this alone I call hoax on this.
20 June 2011 1:06PM
Physiognomy, I meant.
20 June 2011 1:09PM
"He killed a man, either over a woman or a tennis match", over a woman?
20 June 2011 5:25PM
@zibibbo & naysayers
The uncropped image zibibbo has kindly posted is unfortunately still too small, it seems, but fortunately the deeper though still scropped image printed in todays' Guardian newspaper shows the left hand large and clearly enough to see it's an interesting, perhaps relevant (I really don't know) feature.
Though the fingertips are on the page, the rest of the hand, including the thumb, is clearly held above it. For a start, there's an evident space between hand and page that's consistent with the use of 'sculptural' by the Guardian writer to describe Carravagio's style, and this is where the picture I can see develops out of the 2 dimensions of the canvas in a way that reminds me of other Caravaggios: the more I look at it the more I think this is to do with the geometric relations between page, thumb, fingers and canvas.
But I believe the left hand shows us where the missing action is, and even if this painting is not by Caravaggio, makes it a painting worth looking at rather than just another old picture of a monk: Augustine is a philosopher and a believer, he's engaged wholly with his text, whether it's scripture, Plato, or some esteemed heretical peer (dogma is in its early days). The tension and poise, or possibly movement, in his left hand shows that of Augustine's mind, as he reads, hunts perhaps, interprets (head and right hand), argues, doubts, scrutinises, discovers and reveals.
20 June 2011 5:59PM
An image of the full painting can be found here:
http://timestranscript.canadaeast.com/gallery/1412673,686981
I wouldn't rule this out as the real thing. Apart from the compelling -or at least suggestive- provenance evidence (we know that such a painting existed), the Saint Augustine does correspond stylistically to work by the artist from around the same date: compare, especially, the Saint Francis in Ecstasy (Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, CT, USA).
On the other hand, the handling of paint strikes me as a bit too daubed, muddy, and murky to match my own sense of what such a work should like. The reproduction, or bad, past restoration, or simple neglect and disrepair may be to blame. Best to wait and see the object for oneself if possible (it's currently on display at the National Gallery of Canada, and may be traveling to Texas and elsewhere, if I've inferred correctly from my sources) and/or wait for the experts to weigh in once they've properly scrutinized, tested, pontificated.
20 June 2011 8:34PM
@Ariadne69
"He killed a man, either over a woman or a tennis match", over a woman?
Sure Caravaggio fucked both sexes, so why not?
I claim any expertise on Caravaggio other than the usual recognition of light and shade and compositional drama that others have indicated an absence of in this painting. I'm not going to speculate on authenticity of hand, but it does look nothing like the Caravaggios I admire. It might simply be a Caravaggio I don't admire, or one that shows the hand of more than one artist. Could it have been completed by another artist within Caravaggio's lifetime? Can someone who knows this stuff respond? (Knows!)
20 June 2011 8:37PM
Note the significant omission of 'cannot', just before 'claim': a mistake, sorry!
20 June 2011 9:14PM
Well, this is a doozy!
Experts say this is a genuine Caravaggio. Guardian commenters, a lot of whom seem to know what they are talking about, cry fraud!
Surely it is now up to The Guardian to do a follow-up, preferably a piece by Clovis Whitfield (great name) in which it is explained exactly why the experts say this is a genuine Caravaggio.
I'm really looking forward to this.
21 June 2011 9:33AM
To those who suggest that an Old Master painting does not reveal its masterliness in a jpeg: you're wrong. The drawing of this head here does not show a properly structured head, ajpeg of any true Caravaggio does. Colour: a jpeg or a photo may shift a painting's colour key but it will always preserve enough of a painting's colour RELATIONSHIPs to reveal the hand of a master or a mediocrity. The same with the tonal values. I'm a professional painter who's spent decades copying Old Master techniques, cross-referencing constantly between original works in the National Gallery and reproductions and jpegs.
To those who would say Guardian commentators are less qualified to comment on the evidence of their eyes than art experts and scholars, I say this: I have conducted minute analysis over decades of the discrepancies in drawing , tone and colour between the wrongly attributed Rubens' 'Samson and Delilah' and Rubens' other works of the same period, and the differences are so astonishingly obvious that I can assure you that many of these scholars and experts are blind as bats. They are not painters; they do not have an eye for paint. They can be untrustworthy in other areas too. I showed my findings to a reputed scholar on 17th Century Flemish Painting from the Courtauld; after I had demonstrated the vast catalogue of appalling unRubensian crudities in the painting, she changed her opinion that the work was by Rubens, but would not go on record, fearing damage to her career, choosing instead officially to stand by the Rubens attribution.
This 'Caravaggio' here was up till now rightfully described as being by an anonymous hand. The attribution now to Caravaggio is supported only by a single piece of flimsy documentary evidence, i.e, that there was once a painting of this title and 'similar' dimensions by Caravaggio in the inventory of one of his patrons. There is no proof whatever that the painting we are discussing here is that same painting. It could be just what it appears to be: a poor copy of the painting in that inventory.
21 June 2011 3:19PM
For what it's worth, the Italian press thrashed this out a week or so ago, critics and professors, pro and con, swinging away with gusto, a score of journalists commenting breathlessly from ringside, the attribution left very much open to question. Vittorio Sgarbi, for one, thought the Augustine the.doodling and dabbing of a Sunday painter. Of course he would say that, being a gadfly and a compulsive headline grabber,but he wasn't alone in expressing reservations, doubts, or just 'let's wait and see'. I like that the press there hosted a serious debate on the subject, and that the art worlds welcomed one, however grudgingly. The English language coverage has been far sparser (this story, and one or two more; the rest just quoted from the Guardian), and far more unquestioningly respectful of the 'official line' on the attribution. Italy may have lots of problems, but the lack of a robust art press and a diversity of professional opinions aren't among them.
21 June 2011 4:33PM
@JayChen
Well said, JayChen, we simply do not have a robust art press in this country. There seem to be no dissenting voices any more. Everyone's watching their backs fearful that they might fall out of favour with the art elite of museum directors and fashionable galleristas.
UK art critics are too busy building their professional profiles and promoting their own vanity projects to risk challenging the 'official line' presented by the very powerful and entrenched cultural institutions in this country. Indeed, why take the risk if it might impact negatively on your career development?
It's actually a disgrace.