The Resurrection of Lazarus by Caravaggio exhibited at the Palazzo Braschi after a long restoration

The masterpiece "The Raising of Lazarus" (The Raising of Lazarus, 1609), made in the baroque style by the genius Michelangelo Merisi de Caravaggio (Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, 1571-1610), is currently fully restored and will be on display until July 15 this year in the Palazzo Braschi in the Eternal City.

According to researchers of the Italian artist, the painting was painted in 1609, a year after the flight of Caravaggio with his friend, artist Mario Minniti (Mario Minniti, 1577-1640) from a prison in Malta, and a year before his death on July 18 in Porto ’Ercole, Tuscany. Legend has it that for greater certainty, the author painted Lazarus from an exhumed body. Art historians believe that the dark background of the painting is connected with the fact that the artist was limited in time and had to finish the work commissioned by the Genoese merchant Giovanni Batista de Lazari for a church in the Sicilian city of Messina, very quickly.

The restoration of Lazarus’ Resurrection lasted almost 7 months. According to scientists, the hardest part was to restore the part of the painting that was lost during the first restoration in 1670, when the artist Andrea Supavo accidentally deleted a fragment of the painting while cleaning the canvas, for which he was severely criticized by contemporaries, and, according to one version, this died a year later from a heart attack.

The Resurrection of Lazarus, measuring 380 x 275 cm, consists of six parts sewn together. Fortunately, the masterpiece was not damaged during the strong earthquake in Sicily in 1908, when more than 100 thousand people died, and Messina and Reggio Calabria were almost completely destroyed.

Anna Sidorova