00:00Eche Homo, Behold the Man.
00:05Painted by Caravaggio between the years 1605 to 1609, it once belonged to Spain's King
00:11Felipe IV and the Royal Collection, but was almost lost.
00:16Hanging in a private family home for 200 years, somehow it was wrongly attributed to a student
00:23of Spanish painter José de Ribera, and three brothers brought it to auction with a guide
00:28price of just over 1,600 US dollars.
00:36We didn't know it was a Caravaggio, but it had something magical, something different.
00:41We spoke with the Ministry of Culture and said, please, this painting cannot leave Spain.
00:46That caused some controversy.
00:48The auction was stopped.
00:49The painting studied for three years, and eventually it was confirmed to be a Caravaggio.
00:57Eche Homo depicts the judgment of Christ with Pontius Pilate.
01:01It was painted while Caravaggio was on the run as a fugitive after a murder in Rome.
01:07Illuminated with his almost ethereal ability to capture light and shadow, the violence,
01:12drama, blood, and almost unsettling realism are all classic Caravaggio.
01:19Parallels are easily drawn between the enigmatic Italian painter, his tempestuous life, and
01:25the fury of his work.
01:27Eche Homo was bought for somewhere around 40 million US dollars, and is on loan for
01:33the public to see.
01:34I love him for the reality and sometimes cruelty of his paintings with darks and shadows, but
01:44showing really the suffering of the main characters of the painting.
01:52To show his soul of a tormented man who has had a short but very intense and passion life.
02:01If you spend some time looking, you see that the way that he composes, he leads you actually
02:11more gently than you would imagine into the ferocity of his imagery making.
02:20May I ask you to describe Thomas Ripley?
02:23Some experts say that modern painting began with Caravaggio, and now he's having another
02:27renaissance thanks to the hit Netflix show Ripley, based on the 1955 novel The Talented
02:34Mr. Ripley by Patricia Highsmith.
02:38Caravaggio's great contrasts, his chiaroscuro, continue to fascinate 400 years later, visible
02:45in Eche Homo, a work with a life of its own.
02:50Ken Brown, CGTN, Madrid.
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