Caravaggio portrait acquired by Italian state

The Portrait of Monsignor Maffeo Barberini by Baroque master Caravaggio that has long been privately owned and was only loaned out for public display once has been acquired by the Italian state for 30 million euro ($35 million). This is the outcome of more than a year of negotiations between the Ministry of Culture and the anonymous owners, at an eye-watering

Painted around 1599, the portrait captured Maffeo Vincenzo Barberini when he was 30 years old and an up-and-coming cleric of the Apostolic Chamber. His uncle Francesco’s enormous success in business had elevated the Barberini family from minor Florentine nobility to major players in Rome, complete with a panoply of bought-and-paid-for titles and offices from the Catholic Church. He managed to evade the Curia’s rules against running a business while holding ecclesiastical position, and his heirs, including his nephew, did the same. That ensured Maffeo had endless funds to support his rapid rise in the ecclesiastical hierarchy, culminating in his election to the papacy in 1623 as Pope Urban VIII.

The portrait was in the Barberini family collection for more than 300 years, until it was sold in around 1935 when financial distress drove the family to sell much of its unparalleled collection. It was bought by a private collection in Florence and remained there, unseen and unpublished, for decades. It was published for the first time as an autograph work of Caravaggio’s by art historian Roberto Longhi in 1963. The owners kept it entirely behind closed doors for another 60 years after that.

The portrait was finally shown to the public for the first time in 2024 when the owners loaned it to the Gallerie Nazionali di Arte Antica (National Galleries of Ancient Art) in Rome for a special exhibition dedicated to the work. The museum is housed in the Palazzo Barberini, the grand urban palace designed by Gian Lorenzo Bernini for Maffeo after his elevation to the Throne of Peter, so this exhibition was a homecoming for the portrait. More than 450,000 visitors came to see it in the months it was on display.

Now the Portrait of Monsignor Maffeo Barberini will be making another voyage home and this time it’s staying for good. The work will be assigned to the Gallerie Nazionali di Arte Antica to become part of the permanent collections of Palazzo Barberini.

Within the limited corpus of works securely attributed to Caravaggio—around sixty-five paintings worldwide—portraits constitute an extremely rare category: only three are known and universally accepted. The Portrait of Monsignor Maffeo Barberini therefore represents an exceptional example of the Lombard master’s portraiture and a fundamental piece for understanding the evolution of his pictorial language between the late sixteenth and the early seventeenth centuries.

Caravaggio is today one of the most studied and admired artists in the world, yet the number of securely attributed works remains extremely limited, and the appearance on the market of paintings confidently attributed to him is an exceedingly rare event. For this reason, the entry of the Portrait of Monsignor Maffeo Barberini into Italy’s public collections represents a result of great importance both from a scholarly perspective and in terms of cultural policy, ensuring that a masterpiece by Caravaggio becomes part of the national heritage and further strengthens opportunities for research, knowledge and public enjoyment of the artist’s work.

* This article was originally published here