THAT CARAVAGGIO'S ACHIEVEMENT as an artist in Rome, Naples, Malta and Sicily at the turn of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries is now well recogni/ed is in great part due to the pioneering researches of a small band of dedicated scholars, including Roberto Longhi and Denis Mahon, whose systematic and frequently brilliant work on matters of attribution has led, during the past hundred years, to the establishment, out of a tiny corpus of definite works and a whole sea of misattributions, of a substantial and still expanding auvre.