AI finds ‘lute player’ portrait dismissed as copy is a genuine priceless Caravaggio

29 September 2025, 16:59

‘The Lute Player’ is one of three versions – one at Badminton House, one in the Wildenstein collection, and another in the Hermitage Museum in Russia.

The infamously tempestuous painter Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio has few surviving paintings from his short and dramatic career. Now, artificial intelligence has revealed that one painting that had been deemed a copy is in fact a genuine Caravaggio.

The Lute Player was bought for Badminton House in Gloucestershire in the 18th century and had been dismissed by Sotheby’s and the Metropolitan Museum in New York as a mere copy. However, scientific analysis of the painting involving artificial intelligence has concluded that it is by Caravaggio, with a probability of 85.7% – a strong match.

Tests involving artificial intelligence showed a “strong match” with verified paintings. The study was conducted by Art Recognition, a Swiss specialist in authenticating artworks, collaborating on research with Liverpool University among others.

Dr Carina Popovici, its head, told The Guardian: “Everything over 80% is very high.”

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A lute is a plucked stringed musical instrument that was popular in the 16th and 17th centuries, originating from the Arab oud. The European lute has a deep, pear-shaped body, a neck with a bent-back pegbox, and strings hitched to a tension, or a guitar-type bridge glued to the instrument’s belly.

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In 1969, Sotheby’s sold The Lute Player as a copy “after Caravaggio” for £750, and in 2001 sold it as “circle of Caravaggio” for about £71,000. To put this into perspective, in 2019 one of his paintings was discovered and valued at around £96m.

Clovis Whitfield, a British art historian and gallerist, was the buyer and a specialist in Italian old masters. He recognised its quality and the fact that it “corresponded exactly” with a description by Giovanni Baglione in his 1642 Caravaggio biography.

He said: “Baglione mentions minutely observed details such as the reflection on dew drops on the flowers.”

The Lute Player is one of three versions. An undisputed one is in the Hermitage in Russia, and another – in which the lute player is a woman rather than a young man – is in the Wildenstein collection, having been displayed at the Met between 1990 and 2013.

Greensleeves Played on The Renaissance Lute

In 1990, Keith Christiansen, the Met’s then head of European paintings, described the Wildenstein version as an original and the Badminton one as a copy. However, Art Recognition’s analysis concluded that the Wildenstein was “not an authentic work”, with Popovici saying “Our AI returned a negative result.”

Leading lute maker and president of the Lute Society, David Van Edwards said the Wildenstein instrument had “many faults”, unlike those in the Badminton and Hermitage paintings.

Whitfield bought the Badminton painting with Alfred Bader, a collector who died in 2016, to whom Christiansen wrote in 2007: “No one – certainly no modern scholar – has ever or ever would entertain the idea that your painting could be painted by Caravaggio.”

“The AI result knocks Mr Christiansen off his perch,” Whitfield said. Adding that  some Italian scholars were “a bit stuck in the traditional mud” in refusing to accept the attribution, despite wider support from other experts.

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William Audland KC, a barrister who is writing a book on The Lute Player, said: “As a barrister and a litigator, I look at all the evidence in any case very forensically. Taking all the evidence into account, it seems to me that a manifest injustice is being done by any scholar who suggests that the Wildenstein version is autograph and the Badminton version is a poor copy.

“A holistic view of the relevant evidence points to the opposite conclusion, one which has now been corroborated by AI analysis, which is objective, unlike the subjective opinions of scholars which can get in the way. The Badminton version is an astonishing painting. It takes your breath away when you see it.”

Caravaggio was known for his arrogance and also his radical use of chiaroscuro – the use of bold contrasts between light and dark – in his work. He killed a man and escaped Rome rather than face justice. It is not known, however, whether he killed him over a woman or a tennis match.