Caravaggio valuation
Painted saints as the people of the Roman streets, lit by a single beam of light, and changed painting across Europe.
Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (1571–1610) grew up in and around Milan, trained there with Simone Peterzano and came to Rome in the early 1590s, where he painted fruit, musicians and young men for collectors such as Cardinal Francesco Maria del Monte.
What a work by Caravaggio is worth
Send photographs and whatever paperwork came with it. The first question is what the work actually is — edition or unique, when, and in what condition — because everything else follows from the answer. A valuation is free, made online from the photographs you send, and it commits you to nothing. We act for sellers across the United Kingdom, Europe and the United States.
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Bio
Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (1571–1610) grew up in and around Milan, trained there with Simone Peterzano and came to Rome in the early 1590s, where he painted fruit, musicians and young men for collectors such as Cardinal Francesco Maria del Monte. The Calling and the Martyrdom of Saint Matthew, painted for the Contarelli Chapel in San Luigi dei Francesi in 1599–1600, made him famous: real people from the streets of Rome, lit by a sharp beam of light against deep shadow. His violent temper ended his Roman career when he killed a man in 1606, and he worked in Naples, Malta and Sicily in his last years; The Beheading of Saint John the Baptist in Valletta is the only painting he signed. His followers, the Caravaggisti, took his manner to Utrecht, France and Spain.
About sixty to seventy paintings are generally accepted as his, almost all in churches and museums, and an autograph Caravaggio coming to market is a rare event. What does come up is the work of his circle and his many followers, from Bartolomeo Manfredi and Valentin de Boulogne to the Utrecht painters Gerrit van Honthorst and Hendrick ter Brugghen, and copies of his compositions made in the seventeenth century. Rediscoveries do happen and are fiercely debated: a Judith and Holofernes found in a house near Toulouse in 2014 divided specialists, and an Ecce Homo withdrawn from a Madrid sale in 2021 has since been shown at the Prado as his. Technical study of the paint, the lines he incised into his grounds, and provenance decide such cases.
Whitebank Fine Art is an art advisory and gallery, not an auction house, and is not affiliated with any auction house or with the artist, their estate or their representatives. This page describes the range we advise on. Nothing here is investment advice.
