Caravaggio Stolen!
Breaking news: Art News Blog (title link) reports that Caravaggio's The Taking of Christ, sometimes called The Kiss of Judas, has been stolen from Odessa's Museum of Western and Eastern Art in the Ukraine. The original source is Reuters (CLICK), which states the thieves bypassed the museum's outdated 1990's security system by removing a pane of glass from a window without breaking it, then cut the painting from its frame and escaped across the museum's roof. The National Gallery of Ireland owns another painting of this subject by Caravaggio, who painted copies of his works for different patrons. A copy by the master's hand is as valuable as the original. After 400 years, who's to say which truly came first? Art News Blog appears to have posted a graphic of the Irish Museum version (1602). The version above, according to the Web Gallery of Art (CLICK and search), is the Odessa version (ca 1598).
posted by Unknown @ 2.8.08
6 comments
6 Comments:
I ended up posting both versions Ian. The Irish one looks to be the better of the two, but who can tell on the internet!
Hi, Dion
I agree. The Irish one looks far better as a painting, although the cropping is suspect. The Odessa one seems to have been "got at" as though somebody decided to remove the green garment. I read somewhere that the Odessa version had been cleaned in 2006. The big question is: Was the Odessa photo taken before or after cleaning? If they used a Brillo pad to clean it, maybe they wiped off the green garment! The post-clean graphic of Vermeer's Girl With A Pearl Earring shows lots of damage. Cleaning and restoring paintings is a work of art in itself.
What a shame. It's my favourite painting! (after Starry Nights van Van Gogh)
I like the Irish one more (I didn't know Caravaggio copied his own work) I wanted to see the Dublin-painting for years now, but I never had the change to visit the city.
I discovered the painting trough a Kevin Spacey movie, An Ordinary Decent Criminal.
Hi, Sid
Click the link below to see 2 + 2 of Caravaggio's paintings I made into single graphics, so they could be compared onscreen.
http://homepages.tesco.net/ian.cox99/comparisons.htm
The first is Caravaggio's very famous St John the Baptist as a Child (1600). These 2 versions are so similar that it was only when I discovered that 2 museums owned "it" that I realized one was a copy.
On the second Comparisions Page you'll find Caravaggio's The Lute Player. These versions are clearly different: "male" and "female" versions.
In both cases, click the small graphic to see the 1024x768 larger version.
If the above link doesn't work, click the Coxsoft Art link in my sidebar and select Comparisons.
Ooh, that's really interesting. He even changed the sex in a painting once. Nice research.
I remember the first time I saw a Caravaggio. It was The Madonna with the Serpent in a church in Rome. Apparently it was a huge thing in his time because he portrayed the holy child naked. I can remember being really impressed by the clair-obscur and by seeing a painting so big with only a few characters on it. (Most paintings from that time were often very crowded)
Interesting artis and person. Maybe I should review more of his work on my website, Got Art. I started the first, daily updated, art blog in Dutch (for Belgium and The Netherlands).
Glad you liked them.
Caravaggio is one of my all-time favourite artists. The power, drama and realism of his paintings are fantastic. A Google image search will find pages of his works.
He was a hell-raiser too, killed somebody in a duel and had to flee to Malta to escape prison. So his life and paintings are well worth researching and adding to your blog.
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