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Caravaggio on a lire note Shutterstock/vkilikov
evening sitdown
Your evening longread: 'When I saw the painting, I couldn’t believe my eyes'
We bring you an interesting longread each evening to take your mind off the news.
EVERY WEEK, WE bring you a round-up of the best longreads of the past seven days in Sitdown Sunday.
And now, every weeknight, we bring you an evening longread to enjoy which will help you to escape the news cycle.
We’ll be keeping an eye on new longreads and digging back into the archives for some classics.
When an Italian art historian got an email with photos of an unknown artwork, he knew instantly it was by the old master, Caravaggio. But did others?
(The Guardian, approx 7 mins reading time)
The email had come from Giancarlo Ciaroni, the owner of the prestigious Altomani Gallery in Milan and one of Italy’s best-known fine art dealers, who in turn had been passed the photo by an art dealer in the southern Italian region of Basilicata, who had spotted it in the Madrid auction house’s online catalogue. “For years I’ve had friendly relations with hundreds of collectors and fine art dealers,” Pulini said. “They send emails with photos of paintings, often without any text, as the request is implicit: establish a monetary value for the painting, or simply express what I think about it.”
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