On a gray winter day in Paris three years ago, art historian Maria Cristina Terzaghi walked into the back room of a Parisian gallery and came face-to-face with a painting that had been missing for nearly two centuries. The picture was covered in grime, but she recognized it right away: Young Man with a Carafe of Roses , a work believed to have been painted by Caravaggio in the 1590s.

Terzaghi, a professor at Roma Tre University and one of the world’s leading Caravaggio scholars, has now offered her most detailed account yet of the discovery. Writing in La Repubblica on Sunday, she explained why she believes the painting is an original by the Italian Baroque master, rather than one of the copies that have intrigued art historians for decades.

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The painting shows a curly-haired young man in a white shirt leaning against a table covered with fruit, an artichoke, and a glass carafe filled with roses. His mouth hangs just slightly open. One eyebrow is raised, like he’s about to say something.…