Internationally recognised art and literary critic, writer and cultural producer. Published in ELLE, Glamour, Esquire and Cosmopolitan; member of the Union of Writers.
In the first days of 1603 the Roman nobleman Ciriaco Mattei paid Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio 125 scudi for a painting of the arrest of Christ. Some years afterwards the same family paid a minor painter called Giovanni di Attilio twelve scudi to copy it. The two sums sit in the Mattei account books a few pages apart, and four centuries of argument have grown out of the gap between them.
I begin with the money because Caravaggio is too often begun with the knife. He was born in 1571, trained in Milan, reached Rome in the early 1590s with nothing, and by 1600 was the most discussed painter in the city. In May 1606 he killed a man called Ranuccio Tomassoni in a fight and fled. He painted in Naples, Malta and Sicily for four more years and died on the Tuscan coast in July 1610, aged thirty-eight, trying to get home to a pardon he expected. All of this is true, and it has made him the easiest Old Master to sell: a criminal with a paintbrush. I think it explains him badly. A life like that should have produced careless pictures. His are among the most deliberately built in European art.
So I would rather tell his story through what happened to the paintings. They have been rejected, sold under other men’s names, cut out of frames, burned and found again in a dining room. Seven of them follow.
A supper in Trafalgar Square
Anyone in Britain can start with the best evidence free of charge. The Supper at Emmaus hangs in the National Gallery, where it has been since George Vernon presented it in 1839. Ciriaco Mattei bought this one too, in 1601, a year before the arrest scene.
Two disciples have walked all day with a stranger. At table he blesses the bread and they see who he is. One pushes his chair back, and his elbow comes through a tear in his green sleeve towards us. The other throws his arms out so wide that his left hand seems to leave the canvas. A basket of fruit, some of it past its best, hangs over the table edge and looks ready to fall into the room.
The figure I always end up watching is the innkeeper. He stands at Christ’s shoulder with his cap on, closer to the miracle than anyone, and he has understood nothing. Caravaggio lets the revelation reach two men and miss a third who is standing in the same light. For a painter usually described as unsubtle, that is a very exact thought about how belief works.
The Virgin nobody wanted
In 1601 a papal lawyer, Laerzio Cherubini, ordered an altarpiece of the death of the Virgin for the Carmelite church of Santa Maria della Scala in Trastevere. Caravaggio delivered it some years late. The fathers looked at it and refused it.
You can see why. Mary lies across a plain bed in a red dress, her feet bare and a little swollen, one arm dropped. The apostles are old men who do not know what to do with their hands. A girl sits in front on a low chair, bent double, crying. There are no angels and no opening heaven, only a great red curtain pulled up over a death in a poor room.
Then the picture’s luck turned. Rubens, who was in Italy working for the Duke of Mantua, told his employer to buy it, and in 1607 Vincenzo Gonzaga did. Twenty years later most of the Gonzaga collection was sold to Charles I, and the Virgin the Carmelites would not hang came to London. After the king’s execution the Commonwealth sold his pictures. The banker Everhard Jabach bought this one and in 1671 sold it on to Louis XIV. It has been in the Louvre ever since. I find it hard to walk past the story without a small pang: for two decades England owned the greatest of Caravaggio’s altarpieces, and then sold it.
The king’s Caravaggio in the store
Charles I had better fortune, or his heirs did, with a smaller picture. In 1637 he bought The Calling of Saints Peter and Andrew. It was sold with the rest after 1649 and recovered for the Crown under Charles II. Over the next three centuries it darkened, was overpainted and slid down the inventory until it was listed as a copy by an unknown hand and kept in a store at Hampton Court.
Conservators at the Royal Collection began cleaning it at the start of this century. After six years of work they announced, on 10 November 2006, that the copy was the original. The painting had never left royal ownership and had never been hidden. It had simply lost its name, and nobody goes looking for a picture that has no name.
Signed in blood
Caravaggio signed one painting in his whole career, and he chose a horrible place to do it. The Beheading of Saint John the Baptist, finished in 1608, still fills the end wall of the oratory of St John’s Co-Cathedral in Valletta, the room it was made for. The executioner has cut the saint’s throat and is reaching behind his back for a knife to finish. Blood runs from the neck across the floor, and in that blood the painter wrote his name, of which ‘f. Michelang.o’ can still be read. The f stands for fra, brother. He had just been made a Knight of Malta and was proud of it.
It lasted a few months. He was involved in a brawl in which a senior knight was wounded, was locked in Fort St Angelo, got out by means nobody has explained and sailed to Sicily. On 1 December 1608 the Order met to expel him as ‘a foul and rotten member’. The ceremony was held in the oratory, so the knights stripped him of his habit in front of his own signature.
Two losses
Some of the stories have no happy turn. His first altarpiece of Saint Matthew writing the Gospel, with an angel guiding the saint’s clumsy hand, was refused by the church it was painted for and bought by the collector Vincenzo Giustiniani. It ended up in Berlin, and it burned there in 1945 with hundreds of other pictures as the war ended. We know it from black and white photographs.
The other loss was a theft. On the night of 17 October 1969 someone cut the Nativity with Saint Francis and Saint Lawrence out of its frame above the altar of the Oratory of San Lorenzo in Palermo. It has not been seen in public since. Informers have said over the years that the Mafia kept it, that it was damaged in the taking, that it was eaten by pigs in a barn, that it was cut up for sale. None of this has been proved. Since 2015 a facsimile made by Factum Arte has hung in the empty space, and visitors photograph it in the knowledge that it is a facsimile.
A kiss, a copy and a Berlin underpass
Which brings me back to Ciriaco Mattei’s 125 scudi.
The Taking of Christ is a night scene with seven figures jammed into it. Judas has just kissed Christ and still grips him. A soldier’s arm in black armour, polished like a mirror, reaches across the middle of the picture. On the left Saint John runs screaming out of the frame, his red cloak snatched up behind him. On the far right a man holds up a lantern and cranes to see. That face is generally taken to be Caravaggio’s own. His lantern lights almost nothing, because the light that shows us the arrest falls from high on the left, from outside the picture. He painted himself as the man who wanted to look, and gave himself no power over what he saw.
The Mattei kept the painting for two hundred years. By the time Duke Giuseppe Mattei sold it in 1802 to a Scottish collector, William Hamilton Nisbet, it had been catalogued under the name of Gerrit van Honthorst, a Dutch follower. It went to Scotland as a Honthorst. In the 1920s a Dublin paediatrician, Dr Marie Lea-Wilson, bought it, and in the 1930s she gave it to the Jesuit fathers of Leeson Street. It hung in their dining room for more than fifty years. In August 1990 Sergio Benedetti, senior conservator at the National Gallery of Ireland, was asked to the house to look at some pictures and stopped in front of it. Two young Roman researchers, Francesca Cappelletti and Laura Testa, had by then found the Mattei payments in the family archive. The cleaned painting went on show in Dublin on 16 November 1993 and is still there, on loan from the Jesuits.
There was another claimant. In 1868 the diplomat and collector Alexander Basilewski bought a Taking of Christ in Paris. It passed through St Petersburg to Odesa, where the Museum of Western and Eastern Art showed it for decades as the only Caravaggio in the country. At the end of July 2008 thieves took the glass out of a window on the upper floor. The alarm did not sound. They cut the canvas from its stretcher, leaving the edges behind, and on the morning of 31 July the staff found the hole.
How it was found has just been told in detail by Mykhailo Kryhel in Ukrainska Pravda, from interviews with the men who did it, and I can only summarise what they told him. Boris Indychenko, who ran a special operations directorate at the interior ministry, got a lead from a prisoner hoping for a lighter sentence. A police major, Denys Fomichov, was sent in as a businessman with a friend in customs. When that stalled, the team dressed an Odesa exhibition organiser, Roman Topilov, in an expensive watch and a black diamond ring and passed him off as a dealer with an office in Los Angeles. He was introduced to the sellers through a fortune teller one of them consulted. There were meetings in Hungary and Prague. In June 2010, after four months of silence, Fomichov’s telephone rang and he was invited to Berlin. The sellers made him change every piece of clothing and led him through an underpass beneath a railway line to see the canvas. His signal to the German police was a sentence: that the picture was even finer than the one he had seen at an exhibition in Rome. The Germans moved in and made their arrests. One of the officers told the paper that the hardest part of the job was ‘killing the cop in yourself’.
What followed is less like a film. The canvas was now evidence, and it stayed evidence. A trial of five defendants opened in Kyiv’s Podilskyi district court in 2013 and was closed on 28 August 2025 because the limitation period had run out. An appeal court confirmed that in January this year. Nobody was convicted. Restorers in Kyiv were allowed to start work only in 2018 and needed until 2021 to join the cut centre to its edges again.
And the picture they saved is, on the present evidence, the twelve scudi one. The National Gallery of Ireland regards the Odesa canvas as a copy. The Lithuanian National Museum of Art, which is showing it at the Vilnius Picture Gallery until 2 May 2027 after a first showing in Kyiv in February, calls its exhibition The Caravaggio Question and says plainly that at least twelve versions of the composition are known, and that one of the most widely held theories gives this one to Giovanni di Attilio. I admire that title. A museum sheltering a wartime loan could have printed the famous name in large letters and left it there.
Does the answer matter? To an insurer, yes. To me, less than I expected. If di Attilio painted it, the Odesa canvas is what a careful Roman hand made of Caravaggio’s invention within a generation of his death, ordered by the family who owned the original. It has been bought, shipped, hung, slashed, smuggled, bargained over in a Berlin underpass, held by a court for most of two decades and stitched back together a millimetre at a time. It has earned its wall.
What the stories add up to
Put the seven side by side and one thing repeats. These pictures were lost most often in full view. The Dublin original hung over a dining table. The king’s picture lay in the king’s own store. The Louvre’s Virgin was turned away by the men who had ordered her. The thefts in Palermo and Odesa are the exceptions, and even there the thieves seem to have known the name much better than the painting.
Caravaggio painted that problem before it happened to him. The innkeeper at Emmaus stands a foot from the event and misses it. The man with the lantern holds his light up and it shows him nothing. Looking, in these pictures, is hard work that most people present are failing at. I take that as his instruction to critics, and to anyone standing in front of a label that says more, or less, than the canvas can prove.
Maria Bregman is a literary and art critic, writer and editor.
