Fabio D'Aroma
Artist's Main Page

Lost Caravaggio is a recreation of the artist’s first version of “St. Matthew and the Angel”. The painting was commissioned in 1602 for the Contarelli Chapel in the San Luigi dei Francesi Church in Rome but rejected for possessing “neither the decorum nor the appearance of a saint.” It later ended up in Berlin’s Kaiser Friedrich Museum. It was destroyed in the bombing of 1945 and is now known only in black and white photographs.

D’Aroma decided to become a painter after seeing Caravaggio paintings as a child.
He later graduated from the Accademia di Belle Arti in Rome, writing his thesis on Caravaggio.
By measuring the tonalities in the black and white photograph and exhaustively studying Caravaggio’s palette,
Fabio recreated San Matteo e l'Angelo as a tribute to Caravaggio's great influence.