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The last two paintings by Caravaggio at the Metropolitan Museum

Exhibition April 11 − July 9, 2017
The Metropolitan Museum of art borrowed from Banca Intesa Sanpaolo in Naples the last picture Caravaggio (1571-1610) "the Martyrdom of Saint Ursula". It will be exhibited together with the painting "the denial of St. Peter," which the artist also created in the last months of his life and which now belongs to the American Museum.

"The martyrdom of Saint Ursula" by Caravaggio finished in may 1610, two months before his death. Painting, ordered the Genoese patrician Marcantonio Doria, written in unprecedented minimalist style. Artistic interpretation of the tragic fate of the heroine, combined with a laconic style of writing in tune with only one work of Caravaggio – "the denial of St. Peter".

These two unusual paintings will be reunited for the first time since 2004, when London and Naples held an exhibition devoted to the late works of Italian masters. Since then, about the last years of the artist's life became much more well-known. The exposition in the building of the Metropolitan Museum on Fifth Avenue provides a rare opportunity to see these two paintings by close and examine the novelty of a late style of Caravaggio. It is characterized by less emphasis on naturalistic rendering of the figures and a greater emphasis on their psychological state.

In these two works of the painter keenly felt the dark world, burdened with guilt and hopelessness. Some scholars have drawn Parallels between these works and the facts from the biography of Caravaggio, his sense of the tragic nature of life.