The “Lost Caravaggio”: a probable case of goiter in seventeenth-century Italy

The canvas, named “Judith Beheading Holofernes,” was discovered in a sealed-off part of the attic space of a house near Toulouse (France), which had to be accessed to repair a water leak in 2014. The painting represents the biblical figure Judith decapitating Holofernes according to the apocryphal Book of Judith (Fig. 1). Preliminary investigation attributed the painting, probably painted in Rome (or Naples) in 1604–1605, to Caravaggio (1571–1610) although the attribution is still far from certain. However, it most certainly shows a case of goiter in the neck of the old maid. This evidence of probable multinodular goiter (MNG) may be the result of any chronic low-grade, intermittent stimulus to thyroid hyperplasia...