General
Caravaggio Painting, Unseen for Decades, Goes on Display
A portrait by the artist had a public debut in Rome on Friday, after decades hidden away in a private collection. Now Italy wants to buy it.
When Thomas Clement Salomon became the director of Italy’s National Galleries of Ancient Art last January, he lost no time in hatching an ambitious plan: to bring Caravaggio’s “Portrait of Monsignor Maffeo Barberini” on public view.
“It was immediately a priority,” he said in an interview, even though he was aware of the challenges. “I had spoken to many people, and they all said it was impossible.”
The portrait had been in a private collection in Florence for decades, and had not been featured in any of the major Caravaggio exhibitions or been available to scholars to study.
But after months of “decisive and persistent” coaxing of the owners, whose identity has not been disclosed, the painting went on show on Friday at the Palazzo Barberini, the stately residence Barberini had built after he became Pope Urban VIII in 1623. It is one of only a few surviving Caravaggio portraits.
“This is the portrait by Caravaggio that everyone wanted to see for decades,” Salomon said.
The painting will remain on display at the Palazzo Barberini through Feb. 23. Paola Nicita, who co-curated the presentation, described the painting as an “object of desire,” that had remained beyond the reach of museums, seen only by a handful of experts. Now, the portrait would be available for further study, she said.
The painting formally entered into the catalog of Caravaggio works in 1963, when the portrait was published by Roberto Longhi, one of Italy’s foremost 20th-century art historians. That attribution has gone unchallenged, though there are still open questions about the provenance of the work, and even the identity of the sitter.
