Caravaggio, the hard-living, trouble-making, immensely influential Baroque painter, died in 1610 at the age of 38, his body never found. Italy’s National Committee for Cultural Heritage announced today that, thanks to DNA testing his descendants, they are 85 percent positive they have found his remains — a femur, some pieces of skull — in a Tuscan crypt. How Caravaggio died has long been the subject of speculation — was he murdered? Was it syphilis? Lead poisoning? — and the National Committee adds another hypothesis to the list, saying it believes he “may have died from sunstroke while weakened by syphilis.” [Telegraph UK]
