Art historians wait years for a new Caravaggio. Last weekend, two arrived within a day. On 7 November, scholar Gianni Papi presented a portrait of a young man as an early work by Michelangelo Merisi. On 8 November, Maria Cristina Terzaghi announced in La Repubblica that she had identified the original of the “Young Man with a Vase of Roses” – a composition known for a century only through copies. Since then, the Italian and international art press have been debating how much weight each claim can bear.
The roses: a long search with a paper trail
Terzaghi’s painting, oil on canvas measuring 66 by 52.5 centimetres, is in a private collection in France. She describes first seeing it, covered in grime, in the back room of a Paris gallery on a grey winter day. Her provenance reconstruction is detailed: the picture appears in 1607 in the confiscated collection of the painter Cavalier d’Arpino, in whose workshop the young Caravaggio worked; it passed to Cardinal Scipione Borghese and is documented in the Borghese collection, where it remained until 1831. In 1909, the widow of a Paris bookseller sold it at auction as the work of an anonymous Italian painter, and the ancestors of today’s owners bought it.
Four old copies exist, one of them at the High Museum in Atlanta. Terzaghi dates the original to around 1596–97 and links it closely to the Boy Bitten by a Lizard. Both may have belonged to a series on the five senses – the lizard standing for touch, the roses for smell. Where the lizard picture captures a sudden jolt, she sees a calmer, more melancholy mood in the roses: buds and wilting flowers as a meditation on passing youth.
The discovery was not entirely a surprise. Terzaghi had already hinted at a fifth, autograph version in a footnote of the 2025 Rome exhibition catalogue, and a Spanish magazine reported on the painting in January 2025 – with a different dating and a different provenance route via Napoleon’s collection.
The portrait: a hypothesis for now
Papi’s proposal concerns a small canvas, 41 by 31 centimetres, that was sold years ago at Dorotheum as sixteenth-century Tuscan school. He presented it at a conference on portraiture in Montepulciano, but the live stream was cut at the start of his talk, and his full arguments will only appear in the conference proceedings. Until then, as the Italian magazine Finestre sull’Arte put it, the attribution remains an announced hypothesis.
Why it matters
Caravaggio’s early Roman years are among the most debated chapters in Baroque art, partly because he painted half-length figures for the open market and many versions circulated. Every serious new candidate changes the picture of how he worked – and, inevitably, the market value of what hangs on the wall. For now, the roses come with a paper trail; the portrait comes with a promise. Both deserve a careful look before anyone cheers.