Displaying items by tag: Caravaggio

The theft of Caravaggio’s Nativity with St Francis and St Lawrence from an oratory in Palermo in 1969 is still considered one of the worst art crimes in history.

The 17th-century masterpiece – a depiction of the newborn Christ on a bed of straw, painted in the chiaroscuro technique – was thought to have been painted by Caravaggio in Rome and later moved to Sicily, where it hung for centuries before being cut from its frame by two thieves in the night, never to be seen again.

Four hundred years after the end of his action-packed life, Caravaggio is at the center of a new row as two churches in Sicily battle over the ownership of one of his greatest paintings.

"The Burial of Saint Lucy," which the baroque anti-hero painted two years before his death in 1610, has been moved several times for restoration, but now finds itself the center of spat between churches in rival districts in the port of Syracuse.

Works damaged in two devastating fires in 1945 that destroyed around 400 paintings and sculptures stored in Berlin’s Friedrichshain bunker, including pieces by Caravaggio, Rubens and Donatello, are being presented in a new exhibition at the Bode Museum. “The Missing Museum: the Berlin Sculpture and Paintings Collections 70 Years after World War II”, which opened March 19, explores ethical and practical decisions museums face in regards to war-damaged works, namely whether they should be restored or left in their ruined state as a permanent reminder of the horrors of the conflict.

“One of the exhibition’s objectives is to bring these works back from oblivion into people’s consciousness,” says Julien Chapuis, the museum’s deputy director and curator of the show, adding that many of the pieces have not been exhibited since 1939.

Many in the crowd of dealers, collectors, and onlookers attending Sotheby's main sale of Old Master paintings on Thursday January 29 remarked on the difference that a single day made when contrasting the sale with the dismal results at Christie's Old Masters sale the day before (see: Canaletto, Caravaggio Fail to Sell at Christie's Worst Old Masters Sale Since 2002).

The sale totaled $57 million, as compared with an overall presale estimate of $54–77.6 million. Of 104 lots offered, 73 (or 70 percent) found buyers. The stronger sold-by-value rate, 78 percent, reflected spirited bidding on a few key lots.

Sales of Old Masters got off to a slow start as about $42 million of art from the 15th to 19th century was auctioned in New York.

Christie’s sold $36.6 million, missing its low estimate of $54 million in three sales yesterday. Of the 54 lots in its paintings sale, only 22 were sold. Sotheby’s drawings sale totaled $5.3 million, within its estimate of $4.2 million to $5.9 million.

The auctions, which continue through Jan. 30, are offering about $200 million of paintings, drawings and sculptures. The auction houses are trying to revive interest in what had been the most popular category until the 1980s, when other groups such as modern and contemporary art gained favor.

The former owner of a disputed Caravaggio has lost his battle for compensation from an auction house. Lancelot William Thwaytes sold "The Cardsharps" at Sotheby's in 2006 for £46,000 after being told it was by a follower of the Old Master.

The new owner subsequently insured the painting for millions - after a close friend, an art expert, claimed it was in fact an original Caravaggio. Sotheby's maintains the painting is not by the artist.

Mr. Thwaytes attempted to sue Sotheby's of London, for giving him negligent advice after the new owner had the artwork valued at £10m. Lawyers for Mr. Thwaytes accused Sotheby's of not consulting enough top experts or sufficiently testing the painting before the 2006 sale.

Christie's New York has announced that it will auction an extraordinarily rare, early Caravaggio entitled "Boy Peeling a Fruit" (1591) on January 28, as part of Old Masters Week, Art Daily reports.

The masterpiece, which depicts a young boy sitting at a table peeling an orange, has a pre-sale estimate of $3 to $5 million. "Boy Peeling a Fruit" is considered to be one of the earliest known paintings by Caravaggio, and it displays the artist's signature use of dramatic lighting contrasts.

“Picturing Mary” is the most ambitious exhibition mounted by the National Museum of Women in the Arts in years, and given its subject — images of the Virgin Mary — it is likely to be one of its most popular as well. It opens in the middle of the Christmas season, when the subject of Mary is particularly resonant, and it includes more than 60 works, some of them by the most celebrated artists of the Renaissance and baroque eras, including Michelangelo, Botticelli, Caravaggio and Dürer. If this show, which opens Friday, doesn’t fill the museum’s galleries with throngs of visitors, nothing will.

The subject is vast, and doing it justice in one exhibition is impossible. One might organize such a show based on the archetypal narrative moments in Mary’s life — the Annunciation, the Pieta, the Assumption — that have inspired artists for centuries.

A bitter dispute over a painting bought for £140 five decades ago reaches the High Court today – with some of the world’s most prominent Caravaggio experts lining up to take sides.

Sotheby’s is being sued over claims that it misattributed a work – The Cardsharps – to a follower of Caravaggio rather than the Italian painter himself, costing the seller millions of pounds.

The long-lost Caravaggio painting that the baroque master had with him when he died in 1610 has finally been identified, according to the world’s foremost authority on the artist.

Several copies of "Mary Magdalene in Ecstasy" are thought to exist. But now the Caravaggio scholar Mina Gregori has said she is confident of having made a “definitive” verification of the version that she has studied in a private European collection.