THE PAINTING THAT HUNG UNDER THE WRONG NAME FOR A CENTURY
For most of the twentieth century, a Jesuit residence in Dublin had a dark, dramatic painting of a betrayal hanging quietly in its dining hall. The priests who ate beneath it believed it was the work of a minor Dutch follower of a more famous Italian master. It hung there through decades of dinners, unremarkable, misattributed, until a restorer finally looked closely enough in 1990 to recognize what it actually was: a lost original by Caravaggio himself, "The Taking of Christ," painted around 1602 and missing from the historical record for nearly two hundred years. That kind of disappearance was not unusual for him. Caravaggio was, by multiple accounts, the most electrifying Italian painter to work since Michelangelo — whom he was not related to, though he shared the name — and he was almost completely forgotten within years of his own death. Paintings were quietly reassigned to other artists' catalogues. His name barely survived the century he died in, and it would tak...