Finance and Art: "When the Caravaggio No One Thinks Is a Caravaggio Becomes the Basis of an Asset Swap"

From Art Market Monitor:

Buried in this Wall Street Journal story of a young financier who seems to have defrauded the insurance companies he purchased through a private equity firm he owned, is a complex transaction involving a painting thought to be a copy of a Caravaggio:

Before Southport’s first insurance-company purchase had closed, he arranged for a Southport entity to buy a painting, purportedly by Caravaggio, titled “David in the Act of Picking up Goliath’s Severed Head,” according to Delaware court filings. The painting, nearly identical to a Caravaggio in Madrid’s Prado museum, would later play a role in the asset swaps.

The filings show Southport agreed to pay $40 million but put down just $1.5 million, with the rest due more than five years later.

Though it was deemed a likely Caravaggio by a now-deceased Italian art expert, three auction houses have said in the past it was probably a copy painted long ago, according to filings in a Florida court case involving a trust that had owned the painting. […]...MORE