Is This the First Caravaggio?
Also: Hollywood’s teen films, the lessons of “Northanger Abbey,” JSTOR at 30, Antonia Showering’s transcendent figures, and more.
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Good morning! Gianni Papi, one of the world’s leading Caravaggio experts, claims to have found the painter’s first work. Miguel Ángel García Vega reports in El País:
Despite dying at just 39, the master’s oeuvre seems inexhaustible. Every so often, a new painting attributed to the genius emerges. It is estimated that he made around 60 canvases, although he only ever signed The Beheading of the Baptist, in Malta, so controversy always arises when a new candidate appears. The Ecce Homo discovered in Madrid in 2021 was certified by the expert Maria Christina Terzaghi, who also claims to have found the original version of Youth with a Jug of Roses in Paris, of which at least five versions are known. Caravaggio, like many artists past and present, repainted the same subject several times. It was a matter of survival.
Surprisingly, last week, Gianni Papi—one of the world’s leading experts on the artist—announced the discovery of what he believes to be the earliest known painting by the genius: Boy Peeling Fruit (Ragazzo che monda un frutto). The work, an oil on canvas measuring 66 x 51.5 centimeters, was acquired by a private individual in 2024 at a northern European auction as a supposed “Caravaggio copy” and loaned to Papi for study.
“I don’t exclude that the painting could have been painted by the master before his arrival in Rome and that he carried it with him as a kind of calling card. The master, who was born in 1571, could have been around 24 years old at that time,” explains the expert.
The initial doubts were evident. There are about 10 known copies. And it has not yet been possible to trace the painting’s origin. However, Giani has no doubts, having subjected the canvas to an X-ray and a reflectography study.
The owner of the painting remains anonymous.
In other news, The Wall Street Journal reports that the United States encouraged UFO conspiracy theories in order to hide its weapons programs:
A tiny Pentagon office had spent months investigating conspiracy theories about secret Washington UFO programs when it uncovered a shocking truth: At least one of those theories had been fueled by the Pentagon itself.
The congressionally ordered probe took investigators back to the 1980s, when an Air Force colonel visited a bar near Area 51, a top-secret site in the Nevada desert. He gave the owner photos of what might be flying saucers. The photos went up on the walls, and into the local lore went the idea that the U.S. military was secretly testing recovered alien technology.
But the colonel was on a mission—of disinformation. The photos were doctored, the now-retired officer confessed to the Pentagon investigators in 2023. The whole exercise was a ruse to protect what was really going on at Area 51: The Air Force was using the site to develop top-secret stealth fighters, viewed as a critical edge against the Soviet Union. Military leaders were worried that the programs might get exposed if locals somehow glimpsed a test flight of, say, the F-117 stealth fighter, an aircraft that truly did look out of this world. Better that they believe it came from Andromeda.
This episode, reported now for the first time, was just one of a series of discoveries the Pentagon team made as it investigated decades of claims that Washington was hiding what it knew about extraterrestrial life. That effort culminated in a report, released last year by the Defense Department, that found allegations of a government coverup to be baseless.
In fact, a Wall Street Journal investigation reveals, the report itself amounted to a coverup—but not in the way the UFO conspiracy industry would have people believe. The public disclosure left out the truth behind some of the foundational myths about UFOs: The Pentagon itself sometimes deliberately fanned the flames, in what amounted to the U.S. government targeting its own citizens with disinformation.
Kyle Smith reviews a new book about Hollywood’s obsession with teenagers:
Reality shapes the movies, and the movies reshape reality, which makes its way back into film. In the 1950s, for instance, widespread dismay, sensational media coverage and even congressional hearings revolved around the crisis of juvenile delinquency, which yielded a spate of what’s-wrong-with-young-people features, many of them cheesy and laughable. Among the few that gained a hold on the public imagination was “Rebel Without a Cause” (1955), a fairly terrible teen soap that became iconic because its point of view was sympathetic to its desperate youth and because its charismatic young lead, James Dean, had died in a car wreck less than a month before it was released.
The car Dean’s character drove, a Mercury, became the hot-rodders’ “vehicle of choice through most of the 1950s,” writes Bruce Handy in “Hollywood High: A Totally Epic, Way Opinionated History of Teen Movies.” A hoodlum in “American Graffiti” (1973), another defining movie about youth, made a generation later, also drove a Mercury. That film takes place over a single night in 1962, and the choice of car was a joke on its driver, an illustration of a comical urge to cling to a faded past even among young people.
“Rock and roll has been going downhill ever since Buddy Holly died,” the film’s gearhead hero, John, observes; 1973 looked back to 1962, when everyone was sighing about 1959. Most of the songs on the celebrated soundtrack were already oldies on the night it takes place. The movie harbored a droll sensitivity for early-onset nostalgia.
Mr. Handy’s teen-mag title and his book’s colorful packaging belie the author’s seriousness about his subject. A veteran magazine journalist whose credits include a stint at Vanity Fair, he writes with the lively appreciation of a fan rather than with condescension or academic pedantry, combining astute cultural analysis with fascinating trivia.
The disgraced memorialist James Frey has a new book coming out—a novel—and clearly takes himself too seriously. Stuck in the past, he tells Oprah—who outed him for lying in 2006—via The New York Times: “You might be the most influential lady in this world, you won’t stop me. I will lower my head and I will walk forward and I’ll keep throwing punches until I die. You can’t stop me.” Though it is hard to disagree with this: “She told more lies to the public times a thousand than I ever have. And I’ll leave it at that.”
B. D. McClay revisits Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey: “How are people, at any rate, to be understood? And how are we to read the shifting sands of our relationships with others? One reading of Northanger Abbey is that it is a satire about a silly girl who reads so many Gothic novels she begins to think she’s in one. (She believes General Tilney murdered his wife. He didn’t.) But after a good laugh is had at Catherine’s expense, all is well. Instead of being offended by Catherine’s beliefs about his father, Henry teases her. Such things, he tells her, don’t happen in England—not ‘in a country like this … where every man is surrounded by a neighbourhood of voluntary spies.’ (True to form, Catherine fails to catch the joke and retreats to reflect very seriously that such things must simply happen only in Italy.) Such a reading is not wrong, but it’s not complete either. Catherine’s Gothic-novel habit has nothing to do with the book’s final crisis, in which she is abruptly evicted from Northanger Abbey for reasons she doesn’t understand. It turns out that General Tilney has thought all along that she was a wealthy heiress; when he realizes she isn’t, he tries to end the match he has so assiduously encouraged between herself and Henry. Catherine is not the only person to have misread the situation.”
JSTOR at 30: “Established thirty years ago, JSTOR has made a name for itself as a go-to resource for scholars and students of all ages. The number of people who’ve availed themselves of JSTOR since its launch has grown in concert with the robust expansion of materials made available in partnership with publishers, libraries, archives, and other institutions.”
Frederick Forsyth has died. He was 86: “Frederick Forsyth always claimed that when, in early 1970, as an unemployed foreign correspondent, he sat down at a portable typewriter and ‘bashed out’ The Day of the Jackal, he ‘never had the slightest intention of becoming a novelist.’”
Sly Stone has died. He was 82: “As songwriter, producer, arranger, vocalist, multi-instrumentalist and showman supreme, 1993 Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductee Stone led his group Sly and the Family Stone to the top of the charts with a series of energetic, oft-experimental singles and albums, which fused forward-looking, bottom-heavy soul with rock power.”
“Some musicians walk away from their careers. Others just disappear,” Ted Gioia writes. Sly Stone disappeared: “In later years, he occasionally resurfaced, but there was no comeback—more like a series of comedowns. When you read about him in the news, you wished you hadn’t.”
Geoffrey Brock writes about poetry in translation in Poetry: “Who’s to blame for what Damion Searls, in The Philosophy of Translation, calls ‘the annoying claim that translation is impossible’? Despite all evidence to the contrary, the notion that some things (particularly poetry) are untranslatable is so prevalent that it’s often taken as a truism.”
In praise of Antonia Showering’s “transcendent” figures: “Across the 13 oil paintings on view, motherhood imagery abounds, spanning contexts from pregnancy and labor to a child’s loving embrace. Indeed, Showering’s own recent journey into first-time motherhood weighed heavily on the driving vision behind the work. Still, it’s only one component of a broader existential meditation the British artist hopes to convey. ‘It’s general life cycles, this unrelenting march that just continues,’ she says.”
The National Library of Wales is missing 2,200 items: “Among the archives and manuscripts missing are deeds of 13th century Powis Castle, and ‘rolls’ and ‘pedigree’ documents from Gwrych Castle in Abergele . . . Among missing books are the history of the national library building itself in Aberystwyth, Ceredigion, by Daniel Huws, and books by George Bernard Shaw and Virginia Woolf.”
I once found a signed copy of one of Frank O’Hara’s early books of poetry, which was published by the Tibor de Nagy art gallery, in the stacks of a state university library. Only 100 copies were published. When I told the student at the checkout that the book should be placed in the archives, he suggested I check it out and sell it. “You’ll only be fined $50.” I did check it out, but I didn’t sell it. I returned it to a librarian myself who agreed to place it in the archives after much insisting on my part and the supporting opinion of a senior faculty member in the English department.
