A new portrait of Caravaggio unveiled in Rome

If until recently we enjoyed the Prado Museum in Ecce Homo of Caravaggio discovered in 2021, declared non-exportable property of cultural interest (BIC) and purchased by a British collector for 35 million, it is now the Galleria Nazionali di Arte Antica in Rome which shows the Portrait of Monsignor Maffeo Barberini, the last attribution to the master of baroque.

Since this Saturday and until February 23, this portrait, which shows Maffeo Barberini seated in a wooden armchair, his body slightly turned to the left, is exhibited to the public for the first time at the Barberini Palace. This is a historic loan from a private collection.

In the painting, a ray of light illuminates it intensely in a very bare and sober room. The monsignor, aged around thirty, wears a cap and a sleeveless cassock in green tones over a pleated white tunic. His left arm rests on the armrest of the chair and he holds a folded letter in his hand, while in the foreground the light illuminates a roll of documents placed on the chair.

The impatient expression on his face, his half-open mouth and the somewhat abrupt gesture he makes with his right hand, cutting off space, suggest that this is a living character busy giving an order to someone. ‘one off-camera. The elegant chromatic experimentation, the arrangement of the figure diagonally to the background, the contrasts between light and dark, the shape of the rounded hands, the luminosity of the skin and the way the eyes are painted with a white brushstroke . adding intensity to the subject’s gaze are distinctive features of Merisi’s signature style, as critics have noted.

With a few brushstrokes, Caravaggio paints a moving portrait and reveals the mood and personality of his subject, an intellectual from the highest social spheres, monumental in his presence, but quite free from rhetoric.

Made known for the first time by Roberto Longhi in his article Il vero ‘Maffeo Barberini’ by Caravaggiopublished in the magazine Paragon In 1963, the portrait was presented as a key work for understanding Caravaggio as a portraitist, filling a notable gap in the master’s work during the Roman era, as his portraits are extremely rare and almost all have been lost or destroyed.

According to Longhi, the work, discovered in Rome without any documentation, belonged for centuries to the Barberini family collection before ending up in a private collection, probably during the dispersal of the heritage in the 1930s.

The recent publication of the correspondence between Roberto Longhi and Giuliano Briganti (2021) revealed that the discovery and attribution of the portrait to Caravaggio was initially made by Briganti, who granted Longhi the right to publish it. In a letter dated July 2, 1963, the latter confirmed the facts, offering Briganti the possibility of publishing the work.

In any case, Longhi published on the work in September 1963 without mentioning Briganti but praising the restoration work of Alfredo De Sanctis. Federico Zeri also recognized the attribution to Caravaggio. In the photo library of the University of Bologna, a photograph of the painting from Caravaggio’s archives bears Zeri’s signature on the back, indicating that it came from the Roman merchant and expert Sestieri, former curator of the Barberini gallery.

Since its reappearance in 1963, the work has been unanimously recognized by critics for its distinctive stylistic features and the exceptional quality of the portrait; Mia Cinotti, author of one of the most comprehensive monographs on Caravaggio, dating from 1983, had already included it in the Merisi catalog after the owner allowed her to examine the work in depth.

Thomas Clement Salomon, director of the Gallerie Nazionali di Arte Antica, emphasizes that “this is the Caravaggio painting that everyone wanted to see. It seemed impossible. “We are deeply proud that the Gallerie Nazionali di Arte Antica have succeeded in this ambitious challenge: for the first time, this masterpiece will be able to be admired by everyone in the Palazzo Barberini.”

The exceptional nature of this loan constitutes a unique opportunity to admire a work which has never been exhibited to the public and which has always been part of the private collection to which it continues to belong. This exhibition constitutes an unprecedented event, of extraordinary interest both for researchers/experts and for the public.