The Betrayed Dice Player
From the Whatifs Catalogue, the encyclopedia of paintings that never were. Lot of the day on Oct 14.
Created with AI, after Caravaggio, public domain.
The Betrayed Dice Player is an imagined painting attributed, within the Whatifs fiction, to Caravaggio (c. 1597). It belongs to the Whatifs series of works the great masters never painted.
History and rediscovery
Cardinal Del Monte is said to have commissioned a companion piece to The Cardsharps. Mentioned by a single biographer, it vanished when a Roman villa was looted in 1798. It resurfaced in 2023 in the sacristy of a Maltese church, under a blackened varnish that made it pass for a copy. Cleaning revealed the painter's signature incised outlines, scratched with the butt of the brush.
Sale
Within the fiction, the painting sold for €84,500,000 (2025). Tap the board above to replay the imagined bidding. The auction pictured below never took place.
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See also
- Lady with a Falcon, Leonardo da Vinci
- Water Lilies, Night Effect, Claude Monet
- Self-Portrait, Laughing Out Loud, Rembrandt
Notes
- Image generated with AI from a prompt written by Whatifs. No real painting, signature or auction house is reproduced.
- Story written for Whatifs. Any resemblance to real discoveries is coincidental.
