Some 430 years after the Lombard artist Michelangelo Merisi, better known as Caravaggio, swept into Rome to enchant, and land, well-placed patrons with his bold yet intimate artistry, Caravaggio is again grabbing the spotlight, with a blockbuster exhibition at the National Gallery of Ancient Art at Palazzo Barberini.
Chronologically organized, the exhibition, titled “Caravaggio 2025,” tracks the artist’s meteoric career from his arrival in Rome, when he could only afford to use himself as a model, to more flush times, when he was feted by wealthy bankers and cardinals, to his final years on the run, after killing a man, and attempting through art to gain a papal pardon.
Thomas Clement Salomon, the director of the National Gallery, said that with its four Caravaggios and what he called the most important collection of Caravaggesque paintings in the world, the institution was a natural choice to host a Caravaggio extravaganza.
Back to the palazzo after centuries away are three works — “The Cardsharps,” owned by the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth; “Concert” (or “The Musicians”), from the Metropolitan Museum in New York; and “St. Catherine of Alexandria,” from the Thyssen-Bornemisza National Museum in Madrid — that were once part of the collection of Cardinal Antonio Barberini, one long-ago resident of the 17th-century palace.
More than 60,000 tickets have already been sold to the exhibition, which opens Friday and will run through July 6, a testament both to the appeal of Caravaggio’s fierce originality as well as his reputation as Baroque’s sword-bearing bad boy.
Of the 24 works on show, nine are from foreign lenders (five from the United States alone). “There’s a lot of America in this show,” Salomon said in an interview.
“American museums were very generous,” giving “very important loans,” including a “St. Francis in Ecstasy” from Wadsworth Atheneum of Art in Hartford, Conn., a “Martha and Mary Magdalene” from the Detroit Institute of Arts and a “St. John the Baptist” from the Nelson-Atkins Museum in Kansas City, Mo., that allowed the curators to bring together three of Caravaggio’s four known depictions of St. John the Baptist. “It’s not everyone who can get to Kansas City,” said Salomon, who is one of the curators of the exhibition.
The loans have permitted some interesting juxtapositions. Caravaggio was known for using people he knew as his models, often from low social classes and including courtesans, like Fillide Melandroni of Siena, who was famous in Rome at the time. She has been identified by scholars as the model for the “St. Catherine of Alexandria” from Madrid, the woman holding the mirror in “Martha and Mary Magdalene” from Detroit and the protagonist in the Barberini’s “Judith Beheading Holofernes,” which are shown here together.
“For me what’s exciting is to see how Caravaggio acts like a director,” said Maria Cristina Terzaghi, also a curator of the exhibition, describing how Caravaggio could use the same model in different costumes and lighting to create dramatically different works.
The curators said that getting so many works by Caravaggio under one roof should allow scholars to settle several open questions — some more technical, like the dating of some pieces, but also trickier issues where scholarship is split on attribution. In the case of two works where Caravaggio’s authorship is in doubt — a “Narcissus” and a “Portrait of Maffeo Barberini as Protonotary Apostolic” — the comparison alongside universally accepted works may determine if they pass muster.
The show also includes two paintings that have recently emerged from private collections.
One is another portrait of Maffeo Barberini, made public last year, that the National Gallery is negotiating to buy. “It would be a dream,” Salomon said. The painting’s inclusion here, along with a “Portrait of a Knight of Malta,” underscores the void in Caravaggio studies when it comes to portraiture.
Archival sources suggest that Caravaggio painted many portraits, but very few works remain. “It’s part of his output that’s been very hard to nail down,” said Francesca Cappelletti, director of the Borghese Gallery in Rome and another curator of the show.
The other painting is an “Ecce Homo” that emerged at auction in Madrid in 2021. The suggested starting bid was set at 1,500 euros, or about $1,800, but the Spanish government pulled the painting after several Italian dealers and art historians tentatively identified the work as a Caravaggio. After it was restored, the painting was bought by an anonymous client who has lent the work to the Prado Museum in Madrid, which in turn sent it to Rome. The attribution appears to have held since the painting has become public, but the show will permit scholars to view it in the context of other works.
“This is a very scientific exhibit; it’s very much for scholars,” Cappelletti said.
Other questions — over attribution, copies and provenance, to name some — are discussed in the catalog, a compendium of sorts of recent Caravaggio scholarship. “‘Caravaggio 2025’ wants to take stock of what we know today about the master and of the idea that we have of him today,” Terzaghi said.
Scholars concur on about 60 paintings that can be definitively attributed to Caravaggio, said Terzaghi, and a little more than a third of them are included in the show. Several more are visible in Roman museums and churches. “If we calculate them all, I’d say that two-thirds of his work is now in Rome, so if one wants to study Caravaggio, they must come during this period,” she said.
The Borghese Gallery lent three works to the show, but still has three more at home thanks to Cardinal Scipione Borghese, an early fan of Caravaggio. And Rome’s Doria Pamphilj Gallery has two works.
Altarpieces by Caravaggio are found in four Roman churches, though in the case of one, a copy of a “Deposition” hangs instead of the original, which now belongs to the Vatican Museums. Three altar paintings for the Contarelli chapel are in the French church of San Luigi, his first, important religious commission which made him the talk of the town.
His second religious commission consisted of two lateral paintings in the Cerasi Chapel in Santa Maria del Popolo. The first versions, of the “Crucifixion of Peter” and “Conversion of Saul” (both 1604-05), were rejected, scholars say, because they were painted while the chapel was being built, and didn’t fit the space. He repainted both subjects. Subsequently, the “Crucifixion” was lost, but the first version of “Conversion,” which belongs to a private collection in Rome, is included in the show at the Barberini.
“We didn’t ask any churches to loan their paintings; it’s a Jubilee year,” said Salomon, referring to the Roman Catholic Church Holy Year that takes place every 25 years and is expected to bring millions of faithful to Rome and the Vatican in 2025.
Come the end of March, visitors to the show will also be able to get tickets on weekends to see Caravaggio’s only known mural, depicting “Jupiter, Neptune and Pluto,” in the Casino Boncompagni Ludovisi a short stroll away. In addition to this Caravaggio fresco — which he painted for the villa’s first owner, Cardinal Francesco Maria Del Monte, in 1597 — the villa has ceiling frescoes by other Baroque masters, including Giovanni Francesco Barbieri, better known as Guercino.
Although the show was difficult to pull together, Salomon said, “Our greatest joy is to be able to offer this exhibit in the difficult times that we live in today.”
