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Stolen Caravaggio Brought Back To Life

A Caravaggio masterpiece stolen from a church in Sicily in 1969 is being brought back to life for a new Sky Arts programme.

The Nativity With St Francis And St Lawrence has not been seen since it was cut out of its frame by thieves and taken from the Oratory of San Lorenzo in Palermo.

It is thought Caravaggio painted the work in 1609, just a year before his death in Tuscany.

Many people believe the lost work of art is in the hands of the Mafia, while others think it has been destroyed.

It is still on a list of most valuable stolen artworks and valued at over $20m.

Now an art laboratory, led by a British artist, is attempting to create a perfect reproduction of the work using high-tech techniques.

Adam Lowe's Factum Arte digital restoration laboratory has spent two years breathing life into the Nativity again.

"Reproduction is a funny word. I mean, every act of remaking something is really a deep research process, and in the case of what we're doing with the lost Caravaggio from the Oratory of San Lorenzo we're trying to remake an object which no longer exists, which hasn't been seen since 1969," said Lowe.

Photographs of the original and plates from another restoration in 1950 gave Lowe's team an idea of the surface and brush strokes used.

The team also looked at Caravaggio's other paintings to get an idea of style and colour.

Caravaggio lived a colourful life and was notorious for brawling and getting in trouble with the police.

In 1606 he killed, possibly unintentionally, a young man named Ranuccio Tomassoni in Rome and was forced to flee to Naples.

He died in 1610 and human remains found in a church in Porto Ercole, Tuscany in 2010 are believed to almost certainly belong to him.

:: Mystery Of The Lost Caravaggio is on Sky Arts at 8pm on Wednesday