Arena — Season 1, Episode 220: The Caravaggio Conspiracy
Documentary • 90 min • 3 seasons, 689 episodes • ★ 7.2/10
Episode synopsis
On 29 June 1982 a man called John Blake appeared mysteriously bidding in the major auction houses of London and New York. He was in reality the Sunday Times journalist, Peter Watson. The Caravaggio Conspiracy is a true story of a remarkable collaboration between dealers, auction houses and the law to transform Peter Watson , an ignorant outsider, into an international art dealer. Tonight Arena, with the help of the participants, traces the story of how Watson, with a fake limp straight from the pages of a thriller, and a potted knowledge from books of art history, conned his way into a world of mafiosi and art dealers and recovered two masterpieces of stolen Renaissance art.
About Arena
Arena is a British television documentary series, made and broadcast by the BBC. Voted by leading TV executives in Broadcast as one of the top 50 most influential programmes of all time, it has run since 1 October 1975 with over five hundred episodes made, directed by the likes of Martin Scorsese, Alan Yentob, Roly Keating, Frederick Baker, Volker Schlondorff and Vikram Jayanti. Arena's subjects are a roll-call of the world's best known cultural figures from the 20th and 21st centuries, from singers Bob Dylan and Amy Winehouse to academics Edward Said and Eric Hobsbawm, from writers Jean Genet and V S Naipaul to artists Francis Bacon and Louise Bourgeois. The current series editor is Anthony Wall.