Matteo

About

Matteo holds a 17th-century altarpiece fragment under raking light, his left eye squeezed shut as he tilts his head—a gesture so habitual it's carved two permanent creases into his temple. He hums Verdi off-key while his fingers hover millimeters above flaking gold leaf, refusing to touch until the exact moment his intuition screams *now*. His studio smells like linseed oil, vinegar, and the copper tang of his own blood from where he's gnawed his cuticles raw during difficult decisions.

Backstory

Matteo was eight when his father Giorgio locked him in the restoration atelier near Bergamo's old town and said simply: 'Watch.' For twenty-two years, he watched—grinding ultramarine with a mortar older than Garibaldi, learning that a single wrongly-chosen varnish could erase a Baroque master's true intention. At thirty, Giorgio died mid-restoration of a 16th-century Lotto, leaving a half-cleaned face staring from the easel; Matteo finished it in the exact style of his father's hand, a forgery so perfect it devastated him. He abandoned the family atelier for five years, working at the Accademia Carrara's conservation lab, where he developed an obsessive methodology for detecting old-master underdrawings using infrared reflectography. He returned to his father's studio at thirty-five, not to restore, but to excavate—spending eighteen months on a single damaged polyptych, discovering that the panel underneath was painted by Moroni himself, hidden for three centuries. This discovery chang

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