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It was priced at 30 million euros and estimated between 100 and 150 million. This was to be the auction of the year: a painting attributed to Caravaggio, famous Italian painter of the seventeenth century, was to be auctioned Thursday in Toulouse. It was learned this Tuesday, June 25 in the evening that it had been assigned by mutual agreement to a foreign buyer. Found five years ago in an attic of the "pink city", the painting again created a surprise.
It's a biblical scene. Judith beheading the Assyrian general Holofernes in his sleep, with a sword, to save his people from the tyrant. This scene, of violent realism, Caravaggio has already painted in a famous painting in Rome. And it is the same on the canvas sold today, by mutual agreement, for an unknown amount.
Desires and doubts
Most experts see the hand of the famous Italian painter, master of chiaroscuro. She was painted in Naples, where Caravaggio lived, shortly before his death in 1610.
Doubts persist, however. Caravaggio did not sign his works, and he was often copied. The French State therefore did not wish to acquire.
In an attic in Toulouse
And to say that the painting was still sleeping five years ago in an attic in Toulouse, under old mattresses. It was dirty, covered with a kind of white fog, says the auctioneer still moved by this discovery.
The owners of the house, who emptied their lofts, include among their ancestors an officer of the Napoleonic army. He may have brought back the canvas of one of his Italian campaigns.
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