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Am I recording? You are listening to Stuff About Things, an art history podcast. Okay, let's vango. Hello, and welcome to Stuff About Things, an art history podcast. My name is Lindsay, and I am recording this episode against my better judgment because I have a ton of schoolwork to do. And um, I'm doing this instead. Will I regret this later? Probably. Is that promise of regret going to stop me? Nope. So let's get started. Thank you for joining me for episode 8 of the podcast. For this episode, I have decided to go in roughly the opposite direction of the last episode, which focused on the destruction of the Bamyon Buddhas in 2001. Instead, this episode is going to focus on the rediscovery of a work of art. And that work of art is the painting entitled Taking of Christ by the famous, the infamous Caravaggio. The Taking of Christ shook the art world in the 1990s when it was rediscovered after being considered lost for nearly 200 years. But you need to stick around to hear the rest of that story. Many of you listening to this episode will probably already know something about the artist Caravaggio. Because Caravaggio is definitely a sexy artist these days. Ooh, sexy. Not literally, because he's like 400 years worth of dead, but he is one of the hottest name brand artists of our time. He is a blockbuster artist, a rock star of art history. People can't seem to get enough of Caravaggio. And if you didn't know anything about him before this episode, you'll know all about him by the end of it. This episode is about 11 years coming, because Caravaggio is one of the first artists that I learned about when I started getting into art history when I was 17 and in Rome for the first time, and my head was like. As you will learn, Rome is the city most associated with Caravaggio. Many of his paintings are there, and I saw several of them on that first trip to Italy. And 11 years later, I can't seem to quit him. That being said, I am by no means an expert on Caravaggio, but he is up there on my list of subjects that I do feel pretty confident in. I've seen many, many of his works. I've read a very good chunk of the books written about him, and there are literally thousands of them. And my favorite piece of writing that I've ever done was on Caravaggio, so I'm really excited to talk about him and one of his works in this episode. This episode might be a smidge longer than previous episodes, maybe even venturing into the one-hour mark. Oh my god. But I hope that you stick around for the whole thing. I'll start by giving a biography of Caravaggio before transitioning into the story of the painting that I mentioned, The Taking of Christ, which is one of my favorite stories in art history. Without further ado, let's jump in to the story of the man known as a Caravaggio. Foist things foist. Caravaggio's real name is Michelangelo da Marisi da Caravaggio. Now I don't know if you caught that with my pretentious, probably not at all correct Italian accent. But Caravaggio's first name is Michelangelo. Now, where have we heard that name before? Oh hey, maybe it's that super famous Renaissance artist slash ninja turtle, Michelangelo Bonarotti. Can you imagine growing up with the name Michelangelo as you were training to become an artist? That would be the worst. And it would be the worst, especially since Caravaggio was born in 1571, which is just a few years after Michelangelo, the Michelangelo, the Renaissance god Michelangelo, had died. So that's a lot to live up to. Mind you, Caravaggio's parents did not name Caravaggio after Michelangelo. It's more likely that Caravaggio was born around the feast day of Saint Michael the Archangel, and was therefore given the saint's name, which in Italian is Michelangelo. Now it's no surprise that Caravaggio would not want to go by the name of Michelangelo. That name was loaded with too much pressure, too much hype. So he simply goes by Caravaggio, which isn't his last name, but rather the city where he was born in northern Italy, near Milan. You can actually still visit Caravaggio, Italy today. It's a pretty small town, there's not a lot to do, but you can still visit it nevertheless. We don't know much about Caravaggio's early life, but we do know that when he was young, he became an apprentice with a local painter, because that's what aspiring artists did. Someone decided that you were going to become an artist, and then from a very young age, you started this super intense unpaid internship thing that you would do for years in order to learn your craft. The thing is though, is that even at a young age, Caravaggio was a bit of a how should I put this? He was a bit of a strong personality. A rascal, if you will. Yet a little too much attitude. And it's doubtful that he ever finished his apprenticeship. But he somehow learns to paint and he's doing fine up in northern Italy when all of a sudden he leaves the area to head down to Rome. There are even some rumors that he killed a dude and had to flee town, though I think that that's largely unsubstantiated. Although it's not the last time we will hear about Caravaggio in the context of murder. When Caravaggio is about twenty, he finds his way to the eternal city, Rome. Rome has always been an artistic center, and the 16th and 17th centuries are absolutely no exception to that general rule. And that's because Rome is home to the Vatican, which is the administrative and religious center of Catholicism. And in Catholicism, for those of you who might not know, the most important dude besides Jesus and you know God is the Pope, who Catholics believe is God's chosen representative on earth. And the Pope has an entourage of cardinals, or basically like super duper Catholic priests. And in the 16th century and 17th century, and let's face it, even now, they all had money coming out the wazoo, making Rome the place to be if you were an artist. This was especially true in the 1590s, because the year 1600 marked a Jubilee year for the papacy. Basically, the double zeros somehow made this particular year extra holy. And for the year 1600, the Pope and his dudes decided to throw a year-long Catholic party to commemorate the extra holy year. Mind you, Catholic parties often involve a lot of pilgrims and fasting and praying, so it's not your average party, but it's a party nonetheless. For the years leading up to 1600, all of these cardinals and churches and wealthy people were like, oh my god, my chapel is atrocious. I need a new altarpiece. You there, paint me a new altarpiece. And so leading up to 1600, artists were like, work, and they hauled ass to Rome. And that included our boy Caravaggio. But then there were too many artists in Rome, and not all of them could get jobs, at least not consistent jobs. And Caravaggio was one of those people. And so for his first few years in Rome, he was slumming it pretty hard. And it's fitting really because his personality was trash. Seriously, he was a huge butthead, and you can quote me on that, but I digress. From the early to mid-1590s, Caravaggio spent a lot of his time drinking, sleeping around, yelling profanities in the streets, but occasionally he would also find time to paint. And in this early period, Caravaggio's paintings were characterized by the presence of voluptuous-looking young men doing activities like playing lutes, lounging amongst rotting grapes, getting their fingers bit by damn lizards. You know, the basics. Many of these paintings of young men had homoerotic overtones. I say overtones and not undertones, because the homoeroticism is strong in some of them. Now, this in of itself isn't a problem, but Caravaggio wasn't painting these for just anyone. He was painting these images of luscious preteen boys for a man named Cardinal Del Monte. Yes, Cardinal, superpriest of the Catholic Church. And these paintings ended up bringing accusations of homosexuality against both Caravaggio and the Cardinal. Caravaggio's relationship with this wealthy, super connected cardinal set his career on course. When he wasn't painting luscious lipped boys and, you know, drinking himself half to death, Caravaggio was working on massive altarpieces for churches all over Rome, some of which are amongst his most famous works. I will post images of a few of them on the podcast's website, stuff about things, podcast.wordpress.com. Go there and see if you recognize any. This is probably a good time to talk about Caravaggio's general style, which at the time was pretty unusual. Most of Caravaggio's works share a similar feel and even a similar look to one another. Most of his paintings are quite large and they feature life-size figures dressed in contemporary outfits. So if you were a 17th-century Roman looking at these images, you would recognize the people's clothing. Some of his paintings are full length, meaning that they show the entire body of the figures, and others are half-length, meaning that they cut off around the hip area of the figures. What he's most famous for, though, is something called chiaro scuro. Chiaro scuro is a fancy art history term that literally means light dark. Chiaro in Italian literally means light or clear, and scuro means dark. Chiaro scuro, light dark. And what Chiaro Scuro describes is a scene in which the lighting is very dramatic. Think of a stage setup where everything is pretty dark and shadowy, and then you put a spotlight on the figures standing in the foreground. It creates an intense contrast between the beam of light coming from the spotlight, and then in turn turns the shadows really dark and inky and black. And then we have to consider the places where one would encounter most of Caravaggio's works, which was in churches, which in the 1600s did not have electricity. Imagine that. So everything was naturally lit by either sunlight coming from the windows or candles. So in the 17th century, church interiors tended to be dark and shadowy with flickering light. So when you put a massive Caravaggio painting in that environment, it makes the painting meld with its surroundings. It creates an effect of immediacy, as if the painted figures are one with your space. An effect that was heightened by the fact that one, the figures are life size, they're your size, and number two, they were dressed in contemporary 17th-century Roman outfits. In the early 1600s, Caravaggio continues to paint in Rome. He's also committing a lot of crimes and causing general mayhem. We actually know a lot about Caravaggio and his life from police and court documents, because he was getting in trouble all of the time, and sometimes it was serious trouble. He is basically the 17th century equivalent of a jerk frat boy who got drunk and ran around yelling, you'll fight me, bro. Except Caravaggio actually had a legit sword. But seriously, his list of crimes include attacking a barber's assistant, yelling obscenities at the police, throwing rocks at some lady's window, and my favorite, he threw a plate of artichokes at a waiter's head. Needless to say, he wound up in jail a couple times. Enter the year 1606. And what should have been a surprise to no one is that Caravaggio experienced your basic escalation from physical violence to straight up murder. What's more, he murdered a guy after he and that guy got into a fight. And you know what that fight was about? A game of tennis. Yes, Caravaggio killed a dude because of tennis. Now I hate tennis as much as the next person, probably because I'm terrible at it and all sports. But tennis literally drove Caravaggio to commit murder. And even one of the most famous painters in all of Rome cannot get away with murder. Caravaggio's life is not a Shonda Rhimes TV show, although that would be amazing. Naturally, Caravaggio gets to Gettin for fear of getting put in prison. Caravaggio flees Rome and eventually ends up in Naples and southern Italy. He then goes further south to both Sicily and Malta, Malta being the little island between Sicily and North Africa. Even though he's a fugitive, Caravaggio is painting that whole time, leaving behind works in all of the aforementioned places, Naples, Sicily, and Malta. All of these works have the same stage-like feel to them that the earlier works do, though they do tend to be darker and more violent than those works that he produced in Rome. Scholars don't know a ton about this time in Caravaggio's life. I mean, he was on the run, but we do know that somehow Caravaggio landed himself in prison in Malta, which he escaped from, and then he had to flee from the place that he had fled to, and he didn't know where else to go, so he went to Sicily and then made his way back up towards Naples. At this point, it's 1610 and Caravaggio has been on the run for several years. He's tired. He's all rascal out. He wants to go home. So he boards a boat to Rome with a few paintings in hand, hoping that he will be able to bargain those paintings for a papal pardon, meaning that he'd be able to go back and live and work in the place that he had called home for over ten years. When the boat docks at a stop along the way, though, something super ironic happens. Caravaggio is mistakenly arrested. Or we think that he was mistakenly arrested. Knowing him, it's hard to say for sure. Once again, Caravaggio gets put into prison, though he is let out after a couple of days. But by that time, the boat that he had been on had already left. It left two days ago. And his paintings, his last possessions in the world, were on that boat. So what does Caravaggio do? He goes the logical route and just starts running down the beach, probably yelling and delirious, trying to catch a boat that left days beforehand. This is maybe the one point in Caravaggio's life where I just feel bad for the guy. I mean, he just got mistakenly put in prison. He's desperate, he's sick, basically going out of his mind chasing this boat in the heat of summer, and ultimately his body just can't take it anymore, and he winds up with a fever in a hospital in this town of Porto Ercole. And it's here, in this Tuscan port town, that one of the greatest painters in Rome died in squalor at the age of 38. Word spread quickly to Rome that Caravaggio had died. What took a little bit longer to arrive were those paintings that he had left on that boat. It might be a myth, but I've read in a few places that one of those paintings eventually arrived to the cardinal who had the power to grant Caravaggio a papal pardon for his crimes. The painting is one of David with the head of Goliath, David being the young Jewish hero who defeated the giant Goliath with nothing but a slingshot. When the cardinal received and unwrapped this painting, he was met with a gruesome sight. Caravaggio had painted his own face on the decapitated head of Goliath, a villain. Did the cardinal actually receive this painting of a dead man? Did Caravaggio paint it as a visual apology for his sins? Whether or not it's true, it certainly makes a great story. Unfortunately for Caravaggio, his luck didn't get much better, even in death. There was a period of about 30 years in which a bunch of artists imitated Caravaggio's style. These artists were called the Caravaggisti or the Caravaggio's. But that was just a trend and it didn't last all that long. And as the years went on, Caravaggio fell into obscurity. People never quite forgot about him, but he certainly was not considered a great artist by any stretch of the imagination. He was especially hated in the early 1900s, when one major art historian associated Caravaggio with the death of painting. Like this guy accused Caravaggio of murder, but this time he accused Caravaggio of murdering an entire art form. That's pretty bad. It wasn't that no one cared about Caravaggio in the early 1900s. It was that everyone with an opinion worth hearing hated him with a passion. That started to change around the 1950s, when a few art historians began to resurrect Caravaggio and reconsider him as an artist worth anything more than a visceral hatred. And after that, the rest is history. Caravaggio slowly but surely becomes a rock star of art history, up there with names like Michelangelo, Da Vinci, Van Gogh, Picasso. He's a household name now, to the point where he is considered one of the greatest painters of all time. Now there is a certain level of je ne sais quoi about what constitutes a great painter. Like, can anyone really explain it? Not really. But if I were to give you one reason why I think that Caravaggio has been so successful in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, I would say that it's because he is an excellent storyteller. His paintings are usually unpretentious and easy to understand. And that's exactly what churches and patrons wanted back in the 17th century. And it's what most audiences want today. We all just want really good stories. And Caravaggio understood how to tell a good story. Speaking of stories, I have a story for you. But before I start, I do want to acknowledge my major source for this story, which is a book called The Lost Painting by Jonathan Harr, which was first published in 2005. I first read this book when I was 17 and knew nothing about anything, much less art history. And as a 17-year-old who knew nothing about anything, I loved this book. I remember randomly finding it at my public library one summer, and I read that thing cover to cover in like three hours. I could not put it down. And this week I reread the book in preparation for the podcast. And once again, I stayed up way too late reading it cover to cover, even though I know what happens. That's how good this book is. So props to Jonathan Harr, who literally wrote the book on this story. Our story starts in 1602, which is the year that Caravaggio painted The Taking of Christ, which he did for a wealthy guy in Rome named Chiriaco Mattei. We know that Caravaggio did this because people in the 17th century saw it and wrote about it, and there's a paper trail that confirms that this painting by Caravaggio stayed in that family's possession for 200 years. And that's the painting that we are going to talk about for the rest of the episode. The painting itself is now in the National Gallery of Art in Dublin, Ireland. It measures approximately four and a half feet by five feet, and it depicts a famous moment in Jesus' life. As I promised last episode, you're about to get a crash course in Jesus, so hold on tight. Jesus of Nazareth was born around the year zero, or the year zero was created to mark the birth of Jesus, whichever you prefer. As told in the New Testament of the Christian holy book, the Bible, Jesus' mother, whose name was Mary, was a young woman who had never had sexual relations before, but nevertheless she was visited by an angel, and that angel announced to her that she was going to have a baby. It was a miracle, but this wasn't any baby. This is God's baby. God is this baby's daddy. And that baby turned out to be a man named Jesus Christ. Now, as he grew up, Jesus knew that he was the Son of God, and naturally he could perform miracles. And those miracles attracted followers to him because those followers were like Whoa dude, you can perform miracles. Tell me of this god you speak of. And eventually Jesus has twelve main followers, who are known as the apostles, and they operate within the general Jerusalem area, helping people, doing miracles, and talking about God and stuff. But as Robert Frost has told us time and time again, nothing gold can stay. Eventually it gets to the Romans, who are very proud and in charge, that there's this guy named Jesus who is claiming to be the king of the Jews, even though Jesus is like, I never said that. But this is the Roman Empire. You can't be a king because there's an emperor, and emperors don't like it when dudes with long hair and ponytails claim that they are miracle workers or kings, much less both. So the Romans are like, we need to take care of this guy, and they don't mean invite him to dinner. Instead, Jesus rounds up his apostles and he has supper with them. And it's at this supper, this last supper, that Jesus predicts his own death and basically says, I will die for y'all because my death will save you all from eternal damnation. But there's a plot twist, and that Jesus said it'll be one of his apostles who betrays him and hands him over to the Romans. And the apostles are like, What? You might know of this moment from the famous painting by Leonardo da Vinci entitled, You guessed it, The Last Supper. The thing is, there was an apostle named Judas, who is a bit of an odd duck amongst the apostles. And the Romans were like, That's our guy. We can break him. He's our ticket to Jesus. Because they wanted to arrest Jesus. So they promised Judas thirty pieces of silver to tell them who Jesus is. And Judas is like, I'll show you who he is. Be in this place at this time, and I will give you the signal. And the signal is a kiss on the cheek. So after the Last Supper, Jesus is chilling in the garden with his apostles, when Judas gives him a little smackeroo, and the Romans who are present are like, that's our Jesus, and they swarm and arrest Jesus, who is then tried and found guilty of claiming to be the Son of God and the King of Israel. And so the Romans decide to execute him. But before that happens, Jesus is tortured extensively before being nailed to a cross and left to die, which he does. And Christians believe that it's this sacrifice that atones for the sins of man, meaning that if you believe in Jesus with your whole heart, you will be forgiven for your sins and go to heaven when you die. The story of Jesus' life and his teachings was then compiled in the form of four Gospels, which are combined and filled in with a couple of other little things, and together they comprise the New Testament, which is combined with the Old Testament to make the Bible. And thus Christianity was born. The taking of Christ by Caravaggio depicts one scene in particular from that story of Jesus' life that I just told you. It shows the moment in which Christ is arrested in the garden after Judas kisses him on the cheek. Caravaggio tells this story using seven figures, or at least that's how many I can count. If we think about this as a theatrical staging, all of those seven figures are at the very, very front of the stage. You have Jesus at the left being manhandled by both Judas, who has just gotten his stinky breath all over Jesus' face, and a bunch of armored Romans, who entered the scene from the right. There's also an apostle at the far left who is just has his hands up and he's screaming something, and there's also possibly another apostle at the far right who is just there. This figure might be a self-portrait of Caravaggio himself. Caravaggio painted the figures from the hip up, so it isn't a full-length scene, but the figures are life size or bigger, and he painted them in a highly realistic style. Even someone who doesn't know the story of Christ being taken by the Romans could understand the gestures and actions that are happening. There's a sad guy in red and blue that's getting manhandled by some soldiers, and it's causing other people major distress. The painting also has some really beautiful colors. That's another thing that Caravaggio was very good at. He was good with color, but don't trust any pictures of Caravaggio's work that you see online. His paintings are so hard to reproduce in true color, and people always seem to feel the need to play with things like saturation to make the images even more dramatic, which is not necessary. As I said earlier, Caravaggio painted this work for a wealthy Roman man named Chiriaco Matei. Matei paid 125 scooty for the painting. And that's a delightful word. Scooty. It's almost impossible to convert scooty to dollars or euro today, but one of my sources states that 125 scooty in Caravaggio's day would have been enough to pay a year's worth of rent on a small house in Rome. So definitely nothing to sneeze at. That being said, paintings of this caliber often took months, if not years, to make, especially considering all of the other demands on Caravaggio during this time, which is when he was at peak popularity and not wanted for murder yet. The taking of Christ stayed in the Matei family's possession for 200 years. We know that because the family took regular inventories of their possessions, which are essentially just a long list of all of the things the family owns. And throughout the family's inventories in the 17th and 18th centuries, there are mentions of a painting of the taking of Christ by Caravaggio, sometimes even with mentions of where it was located in the family's Roman palace. But as of the 19th century, all mentions of it stop. The painting just ceases to exist in the historical records. And you might be thinking, well, how does that happen? How does something just go missing? Well, it's actually pretty easy. All it takes is one mistake recorded in an inventory. Another thing that can contribute to an artwork being lost is the fortunes of the artist. And as I said, Caravaggio only experienced a resurgent popularity in the past 50 years. In the 18th, 19th, and early 20th centuries, his works were not valuable. And when something is perceived as not having value, it doesn't become a priority. And when things aren't a priority, they tend to get lost in the scheme of things. That's how invaluable works of art end up in garage sales or get rediscovered in someone's dusty, creepy attic. Not that that happens often, but you get my drift. To make matters worse, at least for art historians, is the fact that when Caravaggio was at the height of his popularity during his lifetime, a bunch of other artists made copies of his work, some of which were good and some of which were, uh, not. And The Taking of Christ was one of those works that got copied quite a bit. So when you start tracking down the painting without the proper ownership history, there's nothing that separates a good copy from the original painting, which makes things tricky. After hundreds of years of relative obscurity, Caravaggio starts getting more popular again in the 1950s due to a man named Roberto Longhi. And long story short, over the next 30 years, Caravaggio suddenly becomes this hot commodity. The thing is, over the past 200 years, many of his works had fallen off of the record, and The Taking of Christ was one of those works. But in the late 20th century, people like Roberto Longhi actually start looking for those works, usually with disappointing results. In the 1980s, there were two young art history graduate students in Rome named Francesca Cappelletti and Lauda Testa. Francesca and Lauda have been employed by some fancy art history man who is tracing the provenance or the history of ownership of another Caravaggio painting owned by the same family that had commissioned the Taking of Christ. And while Francesca and Laura are chasing down information about this other work, they start to find references to the taking of Christ. And Francesca and Laura are like, what the what? Can we actually figure out what happened to this other painting too? Something that they do notice is that the Caravaggio painting is mentioned in the family inventories until 1793, when all mentions of a taking of Christ by Caravaggio disappear. There is, however, mention of a painting of the taking of Christ, but it's suddenly listed as being by a different artist, a 17th-century Dutch painter named Gerard von Honthorst, who painted in a similar style to Caravaggio. And Francesca and Laura are like, hey, that's weird. I wonder if whatever clerk wrote this down was mistaken or drunk or misinformed and accidentally misidentified the Caravaggio painting as a Honthorst. And that's logical. And it's the same conclusion drawn by the famous Caravaggio scholar Roberto Longhi, who was obsessed with finding this painting. But what Francesca and Laura realize is that this family, the Matei family, got into some financial trouble in the early 1800s after Napoleon rolled into Italy and screwed everything up. And what do you do when you are a rich family that suddenly needs cash in hand? You start selling your art collection. Francesca and Laura notice that this painting of the Taking of Christ, that's now attributed to Haunthorst, was sold to a Scotsman named William Hamilton Nisbet in 1802. And that is when the paper trail on the painting gets pretty foggy. Francesca in particular spends several years trying to figure out what happened to this work, and in July of 1990, she actually goes to Edinburgh in Scotland to see if she can find any information about the lost work that she suspects is the original Caravaggio. She finds someone who thinks that he knows a little bit about the Hamilton Nesbitt family and their art collection, and he remembers that that family sold a bunch of stuff in 1921. Francesca actually finds a record of an auction in which there was a taking of Christ by Honthorst from the Hamilton collection, but get this, the painting didn't sell at the auction. What's crazier is that the auction house had a basement price for selling works of art, which was about $50. So in 1921, the Taking of Christ went on sale and no one wanted to pay $50 for it, which is insane. Especially when you find out how much it would have gone for later. Even if you didn't know who painted the work, this is a massive painting that is nowadays considered to be a masterpiece. And in 1921, no one wanted to pay for it. So the auction house kept it and probably put it in storage. And that leaves Francesca at a dead end. After years and years of chasing this painting through its paper trail, the trail finally goes dead, and she doesn't know what to do. In a case of extreme serendipity, it just so happens that a month after Francesca leaves Edinburgh, a conservator at the National Gallery of Art in Dublin gets a call from a colleague who asks him to come to a local Jesuit house, a place where Jesuit priests live, to look at a couple of paintings in their collection that they wanted to have cleaned. This conservator's name is Sergio Benedetti, who is an Italian man working in Ireland who trained at the best conservation school in Italy. And Benedetti is like, fine, I'll come look at these paintings and I'll see if I can help these religious men out. Do them a solid. And he goes to the Jesuit house in Dublin and meets the head priest, a man named Father Barber. And Father Barber is like, hey, look at these cool paintings, they're really dirty. Can you clean them? Benedetti is examining one painting in particular. It's a painting that's really dark, hard to see, and desperately needs to be cleaned. But it's clearly a scene of Christ being arrested. Benedetti starts asking Father Barber about this painting. He learns that the painting was given to the Jesuit house in the 1930s, and it's been in their dining hall ever since. Father Barber also tells Benedetti that the Jesuits believe the painting is by Gerard von Honthorst. At least that's what they were told when they received the painting as a gift. And Benedetti is like, holy, I have hit the mother load. Because he recognizes this painting. Not only does it match descriptions of the original Caravaggio from the 17th century, but this painting also looks extremely similar to another painting. A painting located in a museum in Ukraine. A painting that some thought to be the Lost Taking of Christ by Caravaggio, though others were like, I don't know. Benedetti immediately gets to work. He gets the Jesuits permission to take the painting back to the National Gallery, where he plans to clean it and conserve it. And the more time that Benedetti spends with the painting, the more he is convinced that this is not a copy after Caravaggio. This is an original. At this point, Benedetti isn't telling anyone but his bosses what he thinks is happening. Not even the Jesuits. And that's because if this turns out to be a rediscovered Caravaggio painting, every museum with a budget large enough is going to be throwing money at the Jesuits in order to buy it. And Benedetti, who works for the National Gallery of Ireland in Dublin, does not want that. He wants to be the one who gets to clean it and research it and eventually display it in Dublin. Because if you have a lost Caravaggio, people are going to flock to see it. Benedetti has the painting in his conservation studio for well over a year, and he and his colleague do keep in touch with Father Barber, who is like, man, this is taking a lot longer than originally anticipated. In the meantime, Benedetti is cleaning and conserving the painting, which he has slowly but surely convinced his boss is the original Caravaggio. Benedetti has also been in contact with Francesca Cappelletti, who he learned had traced the painting's provenance from 1602 to 1921, because he too wants to be able to put together the provenance of the painting to show where it's been for all of the years that it was quote unquote lost, to prove that the Jesuit house legally owns the painting. He doesn't want anyone coming to the surface who is like, I'm Scottish, and William Hamilton Nesbitz eh, and I want the painting, sir. And the Academy Award for the Worst Scottish Accent goes to me. He discovers in his search that the auction house that ended up not selling the painting in 1921 burned down just a few years after that auction took place. And so a lot of the paperwork is missing. In the early 1930s, a woman named Marie Leah Wilson gave the painting to the Jesuit house as a gift, after the then priest in charge had provided her with great spiritual guidance. Unlucky for her, but lucky for Benedetti and the Jesuits, Marie Leah Wilson had no heirs at the time of her death. So there weren't any snooty kids or nieces and nephews who could have put up a stink about her gifting the painting to the Jesuits once they found out how much it was worth. So Benedetti is like, woof, dodged a bullet there. This brings me to my favorite part of the whole story, which is Sergio Benedetti cleaning and conserving the work, which he is now convinced is the original Caravaggio. Probably worth somewhere in the ballpark of 35 to 45 million dollars. Let me repeat that. 35 to 45 million dollars. Conservation is a very tricky business and it's extremely involved. It includes cleaning soot and layers of varnish off of a painting, it involves taking off the frame, it includes painting in any spots of paint that might have flaked off, and it involves a process called relining, which is one of the hardest aspects of painting conservation. Relining occurs when the paint starts to flake off or come loose from the surface of the canvas. In order to do this, the conservator has to remove the painting from both its frame as well as its stretcher, which is a wooden backing onto which the canvas was stretched before the painter started the work. Once the conservator has removed both the frame and the stretcher, he or she is left with an extremely fragile piece of fabric that happens to have a masterpiece painted on it. That is then laid face down on a table. The conservator then gets another piece of canvas and attaches it to the painting using a waxy glue substance. He or she then uses a hot iron to bond the two pieces of canvas together. The wax substance permeates the canvas and effectively bonds the paint back onto the surface, which makes the painting less prone to flaking or cracking in the future. Now I'm not a conservator, I've just looked into this stuff, so I might not be 100% correct, but that's the idea. As you can probably imagine, this process is extremely difficult. In the book by Jonathan Haar, the photographer for the National Gallery of Dublin, who was responsible for documenting the process of conservation of the Taking of Christ, recalls that he once saw a conservator doing a relining, in which the conservator used too much heat in the bonding process, and it resulted in the opposite of what was supposed to happen. Instead of bonding the paint to the new canvas, the paint detached from the surface of the original canvas and essentially transferred onto the surface of the table on which the conservator was working, ruining the painting. The Taking of Christ did not experience a tragedy akin to that, thank God. But Sergio Benedetti got a little too excited in the conservation process. Now, usually when a conservator re-lines a canvas, they try to use the closest canvas that they can find to the original, and there are all sorts of different kinds of canvas that you can use. But the one that Sergio Benedetti needed was on back order, and Benedetti didn't want to wait and decided to use another kind of canvas that turned out to be stiffer than the Italian canvas that Caravaggio had originally used. So Benedetti uses this other type of canvas, which he fuses together with the old canvas. He's very good at his job. He does this effortlessly. But the new canvas is too stiff, and that results in cracks in the paint's surface worsening, so that suddenly the painting looks like a hundred different puzzle pieces. And Benedetti is like, oh god. And the photographer who is watching all of this happen is like, oh god. But it all turns out fine, and Benedetti fixes his mistake. That's not the only mistake that he makes, but more on that in a little bit. At this point, Benedetti is absolutely certain that he has found a lost Caravaggio. And the time had come that Benedetti had to tell the Jesuits what was up. The whole truth, nothing but the truth, so help him, art history gods. So Benedetti and his colleague go to the Jesuits and they're like, hey, you've got a Caravaggio on your hands. It's probably worth tens of millions of dollars. And the Jesuits are like, oh god. And that's an oh god in two senses of the phrase. The first is, oh my god, that's so amazing. We've got a lost Caravaggio, how cool is that? And the second is, oh my god, there is no way that a Jesuit house in Dublin is capable of ensuring a painting worth tens of millions of dollars. It ain't happening. The Jesuit house also can't pay for security necessary to keep the painting safe from people who wants to steal it. Also, if the Jesuits sold the painting and got tens of millions of dollars for it, yes, they could probably, you know, build a hospital, but they would also look like turds for asking people for donations, which is how the Jesuits usually kept things afloat. Ultimately, Father Barber is a good dude. He decides that it isn't about the money. I mean, it is about the money, but it's also about Ireland having this amazing work of art. And remember, this is the early 1990s. Ireland's image in the media isn't all that great, and local institutions aren't doing fabulous. So Father Barber is like, hey, National Gallery, how about the Jesuits maintain ownership of the painting, but we let you have it on an indefinite loan? Basically, the deal is that the Jesuits will let the National Gallery have the painting in the museum so long as they take care of it and ensure it. But ultimately, the Jesuits still own it and have final say in anything that the museum decides to do with the painting. And that's Ultimately, what happens. Now, when the art world finds out that a lost Caravaggio has been found, people lose their damn minds. This is the find of the century. A painting worth about 40 million dollars as of 1990. Now, I won't be surprised if a genuine Caravaggio got a hundred million on the market today. That's how much these things are worth. So check your creepy attics, people. The painting went on display in the National Gallery in 1993, and the National Gallery of Ireland went from having 50 visitors a day to literally having thousands of visitors every day that were coming to see the Caravaggio, which was on display in a small exhibition. But remember when I said that Sergio Benedetti encountered one more challenge in the restoration process? Well, in 1997, a visitor at the museum noticed a tiny bug on the surface of the canvas, somewhere near the frame. And that visitor, God bless him, told the security guard about it. The conservation team ultimately had the frame removed from the painting, only to reveal that the painting was the home of an infestation of biscuit beetles, which are a type of beetle that are attracted to starch. It turns out that Benedetti had used a glue with starch in it during the relining process, which ultimately led to this infestation. Now, as far as I understand, the painting itself was not harmed by this infestation. The bugs ate through some of the canvas on the back of the painting, but thanks to this visitor's tip-off, the conservators managed to eradicate the issue soon enough to save the painting. Which, like this painting man, it has survived the odds between fires and mistakes and conservation and beatles. But ultimately the painting is fine. It has survived against all odds, and you can still go see it today in Dublin, which I absolutely recommend that you do. Once again, I want to give a huge shout out to Jonathan Harr's book called The Lost Painting, as well as his original 1994 article that appeared in the New York Times called A Hunch, an obsession, a Caravaggio. I will have links to both the book and the article on the podcast's website. I would also recommend checking your local library for the book, which is where I first got my copy. And I know that I already told you the story about how I first read that book when I was 17, and then reread it again in preparation for this episode. But I really do have to emphasize just how much I love this book. And it was especially a joy to read now with a slightly different perspective than I had 10 years ago, because now I have, you know, 10 years of art history under my belt. In all honesty, I have been working really, really hard on my dissertation lately, and I'm slowly dying inside, which is, you know, totally normal at this part of the process. But reading The Lost Painting was a breath of fresh air for me because it was an art history book that made me excited again, and it made me excited to do research, and it reminded me that years of hard work might just eventually pay off. Maybe not in the same way that they did for these Caravaggio scholars, but ultimately we do what we do because we love it. And sometimes, just maybe, we might hit the jackpot. I will leave the taking of Christ there for today, but I do want to say a few more things about Caravaggio. These days, Caravaggio is almost a little too famous, and part of that is because of the year 2010. 2010 marked the 400th anniversary of Caravaggio's death, and if there's one thing I know, it's that museums will always capitalize on random anniversaries like births and deaths. What happened leading up to 2010 was a lot like what happened in Rome up to 1600. Everyone is just getting ready to capitalize on a special year. In 1600, it was a Catholic Jubilee year. In 2010, it was a Caravaggio Jubilee year, and everyone wanted to cash in on the hype. There is an amazing article by art historian Richard Speer called Caravaggio Mania that covers how obsessed our current day and age are with him and his work. And what his article allows us to see is how ridiculous and commodified this artist has become. From pasta sauce labels to dog clothing, Caravaggio and his paintings appear on everything. Personally, I think it's only a matter of time before his life becomes a miniseries on HBO or another network. And no, I'm not kidding. I would not at all be surprised if we ended up getting a Caravaggio show. And part of that is because Caravaggio embodies our conception of an artist as this genius figure who suffers in the name of his art. I mean, there's nothing more cinematic than thinking about this violent mad artist who gets so broken down that he dies after running down the shore of a beach in the dead of summer chasing after a boat carrying his last possessions. I mean, what an ending to this guy's story. Personally, I'm hoping for a Doctor Who episode about it. But we also have to be mindful of how much we deify these individuals. Caravaggio cannot sustain his current level of popularity without becoming something he's not. I mean, for heaven's sake, he was buried in an unmarked grave 400 years ago, and in 2010, which just happened to be the 400th anniversary of his death, some people claimed that they had found his bones, and they displayed those bones as relics. Number one, probably not Caravaggio's bones. Number two, why are we treating this man like a saint? Ultimately, the thing that makes Caravaggio a genius isn't this myth of him as a tortured artist who somehow acquired superhuman, almost saintly status in our modern eyes. Caravaggio was a masterful storyteller, but his talent as a visual storyteller often gets entangled with his own story until the two become so intertwined that you can't see a difference. But even though he made beautiful works of art, Caravaggio's life is not something to put on a pedestal. He was also an abusive, violent, and even unhinged individual who was empowered by the privilege he gained as a result of his artistic success. In the end, there's no shame or disrespect in remembering someone as they were. And Caravaggio was a troubled man who made beautiful works of art. We should praise him where he deserves it, but also acknowledge the failings of his character. Especially when HBO decides to, you know, sexify his life, which, though sex-filled, was I think far from sexy. That being said, I think his paintings are some of the most beautiful in the entire world, and I will happily buy a ticket to the next big Caravaggio exhibition, and the one after that, and the one after that. And when HBO or Netflix comes out with the inevitable Caravaggio mini-series, you'll bet that I'll watch that too. That's all I have for today. As always, you can find information about my source material and support images on the podcast's website. Stuff about things, podcast.wordpress.com. Once again, I highly recommend reading Jonathan Harr's book, The Lost Painting. I also have some recommendations for further Caravaggio reading, both on the taking of Christ as well as just general volumes on his work and life. So go check out the podcast's website for those. And it just so happens that Gus the Dog is a huge Caravaggio fan. And Gus this week decided to infiltrate four Caravaggio paintings, one of which he dragged me into. So on the website, you can see Gus take on four Caravaggio works, including The Calling of St. Matthew, The Fortune Teller, The Incredulity of St. Thomas, and, my favorite, The Basket of Fruit, which features none other than Baby Gus. Gus and I both hope that you enjoy those. With that, I will bring this episode to a close. I'm hoping to have the next episode up in two to three weeks as always, but right now I have a big thing with school that I'm working on. And once I'm over that hurdle in the next month, month and a half, I should be much more timely with my episodes. I absolutely love making these, they bring me a lot of joy, and I really appreciate you taking the time to listen and your patience in waiting in between episodes. I hope you check out the website and follow the podcast on its various social media platforms, as well as on iTunes, all of which I will link on the website. And if you wanted to brighten my day, you could always leave me a review on iTunes or drop me an email. The usual big thanks to musicarchive.org and hooksounds.com for the music I use in the intro and the outro. The first song you hear is a version of Box Brandenburg Concerto number four by Kevin McLeod, and the second, more jaunty tune is called Success Dreams. As always, I hope that you have a great day. I thank you again for making it to the end of this slightly longer episode, and I hope that you take the time to look at something beautiful today. And let's face it, I also hope you take the time to pet a dog. A la próxima sexy.