A killer himself, Caravaggio died at 38 – desperate, disfigured and on the run from the Knights of St John. His greatest works – with which he bargained for his life – cast light on one of art’s darkest mysteries

The National Gallery’s haunting new exhibition The Last Caravaggio has at its heart a sepulchrally toned painting called The Martyrdom of Saint Ursula . Caravaggio includes himself in it as a witness to a brutal murder – a pale, bleak farewell of a self-portrait set against Stygian darkness. An extravagantly armoured man, the chief of the Huns, has been rejected by the beautiful young Ursula. His response is to shoot her with an arrow at point blank range. She contemplates the shaft between her breasts as if she can’t believe what she is seeing: her own death.

Soon after painting this, Caravaggio too would be dead. Sailing north from the Naples area to Rome in the heat of summer in a triangular-sailed felucca, he was arrested at a coastal stop and by the time he was released his luggage, including new paintings, had left without him. He seems to have run or hitched a ride along the coast to catch up with it and probably caught malaria. He was 38 when he died at Porto Ercole in southern Tuscany on 18 July 1610.

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Caravaggio proves haunting, Yinka Shonibare brings colonial figures down to size and Monica Sjöö photographs the goddess feminism – all in your weekly dispatch

The Last Caravaggio
The despair and darkness of Caravaggio’s The Martyrdom of Saint Ursula will hold you transfixed.
• National Gallery, London, 18 April-21 July

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Staff member put work on display at Munich’s Pinakothek der Moderne ‘in hope of achieving his breakthrough’

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One of Europe’s largest museums for contemporary and modern art has fired a member of its technical services team after he was found to have hung one of his own paintings in the gallery.

The 51-year-old man had smuggled his work into the display at Munich’s Pinakothek der Moderne “in the hope of achieving his artistic breakthrough”, the German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung reported , citing police sources.

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Amateur artists join the pros in Gateshead, Old Master pastiches go on show in London, and a bursary for young photographers is launched in memory of the Guardian’s Eamonn McCabe – all in your weekly dispatch

Jerwood Survey III
Well-known artists have each nominated their favourite beginner for this glimpse of the future of art, featuring Philippa Brown, Alliyah Enyo, Paul Nataraj and more.
• Southwark Park Galleries, London , 6 April to 23 June

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Greenham Common inspires a new generation, designer Enzo Mari gets playful and Perth Museum dedicates its first exhibition to a mythical beast prized since antiquity – all in your weekly dispatch

Unicorn
Medieval bestiaries, Renaissance art and narwhal horns make for a fascinating first exhibition in this impressive new Scottish museum .
• Perth Museum, Perth , 30 March to 22 September

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Immersive tour at Musée d’Orsay takes visitors back to 15 April 1874 – the moment that marked the movement’s birth

In a lush red-and-gold carpeted photographer’s studio in northern Paris, Pierre-Auguste Renoir and Edgar Degas are adding the final touches to the hanging of their paintings, while fellow artists Berthe Morisot and Camille Pissarro lament the lack of recognition for their work and Claude Monet bemoans being mistaken for Édouard Manet.

Outside, Parisian gentlemen in top hats and ladies in bustles are admiring the newly completed Opera House or enjoying an early evening drink on the café terraces while horse-drawn carriages clatter down Baron Haussmann’s new grands boulevards.

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A wealth of northern Renaissance drawings; photographers Julia Margaret Cameron and Francesca Woodman, and recognition for gallerist Betty Parsons – all in your weekly dispatch

Bruegel to Rubens: Great Flemish Drawings
Absorbing trip from Flanders to Rome and back with northern Renaissance artists whose drawings have a buttery richness.
• Ashmolean Museum, Oxford , 23 March until 23 June.

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Judge dismisses claim by Stunt and his father that 17th-century work was bought by the latter in 2013

A bankrupt British socialite is the owner of a centuries-old portrait at the centre of a high court legal dispute, a judge has ruled.

James Stunt and his father, Geoffrey Stunt, had been in a legal row with the trustees of James’s bankruptcy over the Anthony Van Dyck painting The Cheeke Sisters.

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After 14 years of research, Christine Cluley sheds light on the work by a ‘Franconian Master’ now on show at Compton Verney

Could a tour guide, someone regularly working close to great works of art, really solve a puzzle that had defeated other scholars? This was the challenge facing Christine Cluley, one of the long-term “experience interpreters” who takes visitors around the collection at Compton Verney in Warwickshire. Now the detective work of the aptly named Cluley has narrowed the hunt for a mysterious unknown painter famous for creating a 500-year-old altarpiece. The work, which is to be displayed in its entirety this Thursday, has been reassembled for the first time in 30 years.

Cluley had always admired the two “wing” panels of the anonymous German work known as the Lamentation Altarpiece that are kept at Compton Verney, and she has spent 14 years unravelling its riddles. Chief among the mysteries is the identity of the painter, thought to have been born around 1472 and to have died in 1563.

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