So finally,have they found his bones?

Italian researchers believe they have found the remains of Caravaggio,but 400 years later some of the mysteries surrounding the death...

Italian researchers believe they have found the remains of Caravaggio,but 400 years later some of the mysteries surrounding the death of the master artist may never be solved.

After a year of digging and analysing centuries-old bones,the researchers said on Wednesday they have identified a set of bones they believe to be Caravaggios,though they admit they can never be 100 per cent certain. They think Caravaggio may have died from sunstroke while weakened by syphilis.

The set of bones a fragment of the frontal part of the skull,two jaw pieces,a femur and a fragment of the sacrum,or the bone at the base of the spine were displayed in Ravenna,a northern Italian city where most of the analyses have been carried out. Kept inside a rectangular plexiglass case,the bones rested on a silk red cushion.

Caravaggio died in Porto Ercole,a beach town on the Tuscan coast,in 1610. At 39,he had been a celebrity painter and led a dissolute life of street brawls,booze and encounters with prostitutes. His last days are shrouded in mystery.

The team of scientists and historians dug up and studied bones found in Porto Ercoles crypts,and combed through archives in search of papers documenting Caravaggios movements. The group conducted carbon dating,DNA tests and other analyses on the bones,until they singled out one set of fragment Find No. 5.

There cant be the scientific certainty because when one works on ancient DNA,it is degraded, said Giorgio Gruppioni,an anthropologist on the team. But only in one set of bones did we find all the elements necessary for it to be Caravaggios age,period in which he died,gender,height.

The DNA comparison was conducted between the bones that had been identified and that of some possible male relatives in Caravaggio,a town in northern Italy where the painter whose real name was Michelangelo Merisi was born in 1571.

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Gruppioni said they identified a genetic combination in those whose last name was Merisi or Merisio. The bones belonged to a man who died between 38 and 40 years of age and at a time around 1610. The bones also presented a high level of lead and other metals associated with painting.