A team of historians recently discovered 100 unpublished sketches by artist Caravaggio in a castle in Milan, estimated at a value of about £560m ($87 million).
According to the Telegraph, the lost Caravaggio sketches were discovered by art historians Maurizio Bernardelli Curuz and Adriana Conconi Fedrigolli in a collection of artworks at the Sforzesco Castle in Milan.
The art collection was found in the studio of Milanese artist, Simone Peterzano, who was the mentor to Caravaggio when the latter was a teenager in the 1580s.
The artistic debate has been published in a two-volume, 477-page e-book, "Young Caravaggio - One hundred rediscovered works" by Amazon.
"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 said.
But according to Dr. John T. Spike, a Caravaggio expert at the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia, the sketches do not match up with Caravaggio's other early work.
The famous painter's earliest known work, Boy Peeling Fruit, was painted in 1592.
According to Spike, the recently discovered sketches do not match Caravaggio's talent level as a teen.
The findings are believed to shed light on Caravaggio's life that has been shrouded in mystery until now.
He is believed to have died in mysterious circumstances in Tuscany, aged 38, possibly of syphilis, sword wounds, malaria or poison from the lead in his paints.
Bernardelli said he wanted to find Caravaggio's early sketches because reportedly Caravaggio's mother, Lucia Aratori, spent a fortune to pay the expensive fees for her son to be an apprentice for four years in Simone Peterzano's studio.
"It is impossible that she would not have wanted to see the results," Bernardelli said.
The Amazon collection will be a reward.
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