Caravaggio has replaced Michaelangelo as Italy’s top artist.

By at least one amusing new metric, Michelangelo’s unofficial 500-year run at the top of the Italian art charts has ended. Caravaggio, who somehow found time to paint when he wasn’t brawling, scandalizing pooh-bahs, chasing women (and men), murdering a tennis opponent with a dagger to the groin, fleeing police assassins or getting his face mutilated by one of his many enemies, has bumped him from his perch.

That’s according to an art historian at the University of Toronto, Philip Sohm. He has studied the number of writings (books, catalogs and scholarly papers) on both of them during the last 50 years. Mr. Sohm has found that Caravaggio has gradually, if unevenly, overtaken Michelangelo.

He has charts to prove it.

The change, most obvious since the mid-1980s, doesn’t exactly mean Michelangelo has dropped down the memory hole. To judge from the throngs still jamming the Sistine Chapel and lining up outside the Accademia in Florence to check out “David,” his popularity hasn’t dwindled much.

But, charts or no charts, Mr. Sohm has touched on something. Caravaggiomania, as he calls it, implies not just that art history doctoral students may finally be struggling to think up anything fresh to say about Michelangelo. It suggests that the whole classical tradition in which Michelangelo was steeped is becoming ever more foreign and therefore seemingly less germane, even to many educated people. His otherworldly muscle men, casting the damned into hell or straining to emerge from thick blocks of veined marble, aspired to an abstract and bygone ideal of the sublime, grounded in Renaissance rhetoric, which, for postwar generations, now belongs with the poetry of Alexander Pope or plays by Corneille as admirable but culturally remote splendors.

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Frescoes painted by 14 century master Giotto have been brought to life under ultraviolet light, revealing the artwork’s long-lost colour and detail.

The researchers stumbled on the ultraviolet technique by accident, after spending four months mapping the frescoes as preparation for a possible future restoration.

In the course of the project, they found that by shining ultraviolet light on the paintings they were able to see much more than was visible to the naked eye.

The frescoes are thought to have been admired by Michelangelo and are said to have influenced his work nearly 200 years later.

The paintings were covered in whitewash in the 18th century and then underwent a brutal restoration in 1840, when the whitewash was removed with the aid of steel wool scrubbers and solvents. The work left the masterpieces faded, scratched and washed out.

Art lovers, however, are unlikely to see the enhanced paintings because permanently bathing them in ultraviolet would damage them.

Restorers hope instead to use the ultraviolet images to build a computer-generated facsimile of the chapel.

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Deterioration of a 16th century painting of Queen Elizabeth I has revealed a mysterious coiled snake in her hands.

The serpent was depicted being clasped in the Tudor monarch’s fingers in the original version of the work – but it was painted over at the last minute and replaced with a more decorative bunch of roses.

Deterioration over time has meant the snake has revealed itself once more, with its outline now visible on the surface.

A serpent was sometimes used to reflect wisdom, prudence and reasoned judgment, but the scaly creatures are also linked to notions of Satan and original sin.

The gallery suggested the snake’s removal may have been due to the ambiguity of the emblem.

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Italian researchers are claiming that famed artist Caravaggio’s mad exploits were the result of lead poisoning from the paints he used.

A team of anthropologists hope to prove their theory by carrying out DNA tests on bones which they believe are the remains of the Renaissance artist.

Caravaggio was renowned for his hot temper, heavy drinking and violent temperament and was forced to go on the run in 1606 after killing a man in a tavern brawl, a crime for which he was condemned to death by Pope Paul V.

He died in July 1610 at the age of 39, with mystery surrounding the circumstances of his death ever since.

It has been suggested he contracted syphilis or even that he was assassinated but anthropologists from the universities of Pisa, Ravenna and Bologna are studying other theories – that he contracted malaria while travelling in Italy or that he suffered from lead poisoning.

“Lead poisoning accentuates traits like aggressive and nervous behaviour, which Caravaggio displayed during his life,” said Silvano Vinceti, the team leader.

“Painters in the 15th, 16th and 17th centuries used these paints all the time and often suffered serious health problems as a result.”

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Famed psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud may have had a Hitler original hanging on the wall of his office.

A watercolour by the German dictator has come to light that has an inscription on the back that bears the name of Freud’s medical practice in Vienna.

While Freud was based in the Austrian city in 1910 it is possible he or one of his staff bought the picture from the struggling artist.

Hitler was a jobbing painter at the time, knocking out postcards and paintings and trying to make a living.

This painting, that measures 8in by 4in, shows what looks like a small church with a background of mountains and is signed “A Hitler 1910.”

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