“Mystery Masterpiece: 350-Year-Old Caravaggio Unveiled from Dusty Attic Hideaway in France!”
The painting is Caravaggio’s Judith and Holofernes and is estimated to have been created in 1607. It depicts the beheading of Assyrian General Holofernes by the beautiful widow Judith, for whom the former had affections.
The artwork is being prepared for auction in Toulouse, France, with bidding starting between $113.2 million to $169.7 million, mostly due to its obfuscated past. The hefty price tag could set a record seeing as the last most expensive Caravaggio went for a mere $145,500 in 1998.
The discovery of the priceless painting might seem like serendipity, but really it was only a matter of time before the family, who has opted to remain anonymous, found the hidden masterpiece in the attic of a home that has belonged to the family since 1871. It had miraculously survived years of neglect in a leaky attic behind old mattresses and box springs.
The six-foot-wide painting went unnoticed when the family cleared and fixed the attic during a leak. It went untouched when the house was broken into by thieves who apparently missed the biggest score the home had to offer.
It wasn’t until the family was cleaning out the attic space that they found it and contacted local auctioneer Marc Labarbe who reached out to Parisian Old Master dealer Eric Turquin for a second opinion. It took them three months of analysis to confirm that it was, indeed, a Caravaggio original.
“Not only is it a Caravaggio, but of all the Caravaggios that are known today, this is one of the great pictures,” Turquin told the Daily Mail. “The painting is in an extraordinarily good state, much better than the Caravaggios I have seen in Naples.”
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