Lost Caravaggio masterpiece worth £100m found in a sealed attic in Toulouse (independent.co.uk).
“A painting found in a leaky attic in Toulouse has been provisionally identified as a lost masterpiece by late 16th-century Italian painter Caravaggio worth an estimated €120m (£95.7m). A French art expert said he believed that the bloody biblical scene was Caravaggio’s Judith Beheading Holofernes, painted in the early 17th century and lost a century later. … The large painting was discovered two years ago in a sealed attic in the South-western French city when the house owners were searching for the source of a leak in the roof.”
A lucky find indeed on a rainy day, if ever able to be proved and unsigned work’s authenticity accepted when study claims that over 70 percent of artworks for sale are either fakes or misattributions (thedailybeast.com, Oct. 2014), and a look at poor Holofernes’ anguished but extremely detailed face certainly adds painterly weight to the hypotheses that Caravaggio and other masters of his era made use of the camera obscura (brandeis.edu), a trend upsetting the romanticised notion of “real” artists only painting from life rather than using lenses—including the camera today—for reference that is now widely accepted and the camera’s ability to lie countered, except by those more keen on said “romantic” notion in art and the general fact that in todays camera rich image world a the perspective provided by one is more “natural” than… life, but indeed, that has been true for some time, indeed, if Renaissance masters were using lenses too, longer than most may think: Perspective distortion (Wikipedia).
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