Two paintings believed to be lost works by Caravaggio emerged in the space of a single weekend, in announcements made separately by two Italian art historians.

The first claim came from Gianni Papi, who presented a dark portrait of a young man at a conference held at the Pinacoteca Civica in Montepulciano on 7 November. The canvas had previously been catalogued as the work of the 16th-century Tuscan school and changed hands at Vienna's Dorotheum auction house in 2017 for €3,810, roughly $4,300. Papi said his research would be published when the conference proceedings appear, and he declined to discuss it further until then. He made a similar claim last year, identifying a painting of a boy peeling fruit, thought to date from 1592-93, as the earliest known Caravaggio.

The second announcement followed a day later. Maria Cristina Terzaghi, who co-curated the major Caravaggio exhibition staged at Rome's Palazzo Barberini last year, told the Italian newspaper La Repubblica that Young Man with a Vase of Roses had been traced to a private collection in France. Until now the composition was known only through copies and a description written by the painter Giovanni Baglione, a contemporary of Caravaggio.

Terzaghi said she had come across the original years ago at the back of a Paris gallery and recognised it at once. She pointed to the quality of the work, above all the boy's face, his moist eyes, the bright whites of his shirt and the still life, as leaving no doubt about who painted it. She dates the picture to around 1596-97.

Records show the painting once belonged to Cavalier d'Arpino, a painter who worked in Caravaggio's circle around 1596. His collection was seized in 1607 in exchange for his freedom during a criminal trial, and the picture passed through Pope Paul V to his nephew, Cardinal Scipione Borghese. It stayed with the Borghese family until at least 1831 and was sold at auction in Paris in 1909, after which its whereabouts were unknown.