A Lost Caravaggio Found in Paris? Terzaghi Identifies the Original Young Man with a Vase of Roses
For more than a century, Caravaggio’s Young Man with a Vase of Roses was known only from copies. Now the Italian art historian Maria Cristina Terzaghi says she has found the original, in a private collection in France. She announced the discovery in La Repubblica on Sunday 8 November 2026, a day after another scholar, Gianni Papi, proposed a different new Caravaggio: two attributions in twenty-four hours.
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What: Young Man with a Vase of Roses, proposed as Caravaggio’s lost original
Who: Maria Cristina Terzaghi, Caravaggio scholar, in La Repubblica, 8 November 2026
Where: Private collection, France (found in the back room of a Paris gallery)
Size: Oil on canvas, 66 × 52.5 cm
Date proposed: 1596–97, soon after the Boy Bitten by a Lizard
Status: A new attribution; the full study is still to be published
Section: Discoveries & Restorations
What happened
According to Finestre sull’Arte, Terzaghi first came across the painting “on a gray winter day, in the back room of a Parisian gallery”. Although covered in grime, she says, she immediately recognised the composition. She has been working on it for three years and had already hinted at it in the catalogue of the 2025 Caravaggio exhibition in Rome, where she mentioned a fifth version “of the highest quality” in a French private collection, which she considered autograph. Four old copies of the picture were known, one of them in the High Museum in Atlanta, and their existence had long kept alive the hope that the original survived.
Terzaghi traces the painting back to 1607, when the collection of the painter Giuseppe Cesari, the Cavalier d’Arpino, in whose workshop the young Caravaggio had worked, was confiscated and passed to Cardinal Scipione Borghese. It is recorded in the Borghese collection in 1693, in the same room as Caravaggio’s Boy with a Basket of Fruit, and stayed with the family until 1831. By 1909 it belonged to a Paris bookseller, and at his widow’s sale it was bought, as the work of an anonymous Italian painter, by the ancestors of the present owners. How it travelled from Rome to Paris is still unknown. The Spanish magazine Ars Magazine had already reported the rediscovery in January 2025, suggesting a passage through Napoleon’s collection and an earlier date of about 1592–93.
The day before, on 7 November, the art historian Gianni Papi had proposed at a conference in Montepulciano that a small Portrait of a Young Man, once sold at the Dorotheum auction house as a sixteenth-century Tuscan work, is also by Caravaggio. His arguments will only be made public in the conference proceedings.
Why it matters
The Young Man with a Vase of Roses belongs to the very beginning of Caravaggio’s career in Rome, the years of half-length pictures of boys painted for the market. Terzaghi links it closely to the Boy Bitten by a Lizard, the picture contemporaries said had made him famous, and some scholars have read the two as part of a series on the five senses: touch for the lizard, smell for the roses. The roses themselves, some in bud and some already wilting, speak of love and the passing of youth. If the attribution is accepted, it gives us the original of a famous lost early work. As always with new Caravaggios, though, it will need to win over other specialists, and the full publication is still to come.
The painting behind the story
The Penitent Magdalene in the Doria Pamphilj Gallery in Rome comes from the same early Roman years. A young woman sits on a low chair with her head bowed and her hands folded in her lap, her jewels and a glass flask abandoned on the floor beside her. There is no halo, no skull, no cave in the desert: only a girl in a plain room, lost in thought. It is the same calm, melancholy mood Terzaghi sees in the Young Man with a Vase of Roses. For another Caravaggio that turned up where nobody expected it, read The Taking of Christ by Caravaggio: The Masterpiece Found in a Dublin Dining Room; and for Caravaggio on show this autumn, see our story on Caravaggio in Parma.
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💬 Over to you: Should a newly found Caravaggio stay in a private collection, or would you rather see it in a museum? And where in the world are you reading from? Tell us in the comments.
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