Sergio Benedetti

Sergio Adriano Benedetti (28 October 1942 – 24 January 2018) was an Italian art historian and formerly Head Curator and Keeper of the Collection of the National Gallery of Ireland. Born in East Afrcia, Benedetti grew up in Florence, where he retired. Benedetti also played a role in the acquisition of Antonio Canova's Amorino (1789-91), an important Neo-classical sculpture, which had been commissioned in Ireland by a banker, but had been lost for over a century, until it was discovered the UK. Benedetti recognized the painting's quality in a building owned by the Jesuit Fathers in Dublin, and he was ultimately able to trace its provenance back to Caravaggio. As the Irish Times put it: "Extraordinarily, few people in the world were as well qualified as he to recognise, hanging in the Jesuits’ dining room, despite the dust and wear and tear of hundreds of years, a lost composition by one of the most celebrated painters in the history of western art...." The paper also noted that "he immediately suspected that he had seen the lost original of a painting known through many copies." rediscovery of the painting is the subject of a book by Jonathan Harr called The Lost Painting: The Quest for a Caravaggio Masterpiece (New York: Random House, 2005).

Benedetti also curated exhibitions at the National Gallery of Ireland, including Caravaggio and his Followers in 1992, and A Scholar's Eye: Paintings from the Sir Denis Mahon Collection.