100 `Caravaggio sketches` found in Milan castle

Zeenews Bureau

New Delhi: A team of historians have stumbled upon 100 unknown sketches by master artist Caravaggio hidden in a castle in Milan. The sketches, which were previously undiscovered, are roughly estimated at £560m. The sketches were found among the other works in the archive of painter Simone Peterzano, who employed the teenage Michelangelo Merisi, known as Caravaggio, as an apprentice between 1584 and 1588. Later the young Caravaggio headed south to Rome to carry on with his solo work. "We always felt it was impossible that Caravaggio left no record, no studies in the workshop of a painter as famous as his mentor," Maurizio Bernardelli Curuz Guerrieri, artistic director for the Brescia Museum Foundation, told Italian news agency Ansa. The sketches attributed to the artist, who championed the dramatic chiaroscuro technique of mixing light and shade, and whose popularity has soared over the past century, will be published on Friday in an ebook to be sold on Amazon.