Palazzo Barberini and Caravaggio. In the bedlam of the blockbuster exhibition of the year.

One struggles beyond measure to catch a glimpse of an exhibition in the exhibition halls of Palazzo Barberini, where for just over a week the public has been admitted to a new, unfailing, unmissable Caravaggio epiphany, organized to coincide with the Jubilee. And we are not just referring to the physical commitment required by a string of Caravaggio’s cornerstones crammed into a space wholly inadequate to accommodate the crowds of pilgrims patiently awaiting the moment to pass through the holy door to plunge into the darkness of Caravaggio 2025, a title chosen to associate Merisi’s name with the year of the remission of sins. Caravaggio is worth a sacramental penance, will think the tens of thousands who have already gone on the offensive of online ticket resales and make the organization jubilant (it seems the sixty-thousand-booked-entry threshold has already been knocked down after just a few hours of going on sale). One struggles to catch a glimpse of an exhibition, meanwhile, because the halls are borderline impassable, packed as they are with crowds of adoring devotees. They look like Angelico’s blessed ones in contemplation of Christ the Judge who is displayed a little further on, in the halls of the permanent collection: equally attentive, equally illuminated, with the only difference being that instead of embracing each other like Angelico’s blessed, Caravaggio’s worshippers scramble to procure a few seconds in a frontal position in the presence of the sacred icon, before being engulfed by those who have lost their sprint and are pushing from behind. Or they raise the decibels of their audio guides beyond the threshold of personal listening by triggering canons with countless counterpoint voices. The most intrepid even go so far as to monopolize the space in front of the work in order to have their posed selfie taken, since for some the selfie is evidently not enough to preserve the memory of their presence before the totem pole. And all of this, of course, while cultivating the hope that a group will not plunge into the hall between head and neck: in fact, groups of up to twenty-five people are allowed to enter. The point is that the organizers had some twenty textbook works convened in Rome and thought to thicken them in the ground-floor rooms of Palazzo Barberini, good for art exhibitions, less good, on the other hand, for ostensions, for gatherings of pop stars. Twice as much space would have been needed, keeping the number of visitors unchanged. Or it would have been useful to dilute the succession to dissipate the clusters.

The problem is that to fluidize the density of masterpieces would have necessitated the staging of an exhibition. An exhibition that would exploit perhaps, as was done for the fine exhibition on Urban VIII a couple of years ago, also the monumental halls of the piano nobile: one struggles then to catch a glimpse of an exhibition for the simple fact that there is no exhibition, where “exhibition” means, trivially, a collection of works chosen according to selective parameters in order to illustrate an idea or give an account of a passage in art history. There is, if anything, a parade of icons (and some presence on which the critics are far from agreeing) set up with the same logic with which sticker albums are composed: the juxtaposition of famous images. After that, should the triumphal parade also fit the definition of “exhibition,” then Caravaggio 2025 can be said to be one of the most successful exhibitions of recent years.

After all, the same team that curated the exhibition (i.e., the two Caravaggists Francesca Cappelletti and Maria Cristina Terzaghi, joined by Thomas Clement Salomon, who, as is now increasingly the custom, as director of the host museum figures as curator) decided to welcome the public by indulging its Caravaggesque thirst. Right from the introduction in the first room, the 1951 exhibition is evoked (there is probably no exhibition on Caravaggio that is not now accompanied by the unleashing of Longhi’s ghost) to establish a sort of founding myth toward which the present and living occasion turns its gaze, “a unique and unrepeatable opportunity to admire gathered together twenty-four masterpieces by Merisi from all over the world,” the first panel blanders. Caravaggio 2025 is one of those unique and unrepeatable occasions that recur roughly every seven to eight years, since it is known to all that Caravaggio’s name has a more than that of any other artist of the past or present, and then the Italian public knows that exhibitions on Caravaggio, the more substantial ones, those capable of gathering at least a score of autograph works, arrive with a slightly more dilated cadence than that of an Olympiad. The most recent major exhibition occasion of only works by the master had been not the 2010 one at the Scuderie del Quirinale, as Terzaghi recalled in an interview with the Giornale dell’Arte, but the 2017 one in Milan, in the halls of the Palazzo Reale, curated by Rossella Vodret, with a selection largely superimposable on that of the Palazzo Barberini exhibition: there was the St. Francis of Hartford, the Martha and Magdalene of Detroit, the St. John the Baptist of Kansas City, as well as several Italian works, from the Flagellation to the Good Fortune, from the Portrait of a Knight of Malta to the Martyrdom of St. Ursula. Previously there was the Scuderie del Quirinale exhibition in 2010, and even earlier the one on the “last time,” or Caravaggio from 1606 to 1610, organized in 2004 at the Museo Nazionale di Capodimonte in Naples.

The main difference from the most numerically substantial of the recent exhibitions, the one at the Scuderie del Quirinale, lies in the fact that fifteen years ago there were only autograph works: this year, despite the announcements on the eve (again in the aforementioned interview, Cappelletti asserted that we would see “a Caravaggio in massive doses and in its pure state,” “neither pupils nor followers in the exhibition, only autograph paintings”), and wanting to exclude theEcce Homo on which we do not feel we can consider the game closed, there are at least three spurious presences, namely the Narcissus, the Mondafrutto and the Portrait of Maffeo Barberini , which, placed next to the homologous portrait exhibited for the first time to the public a few weeks ago, again at Palazzo Barberini, inevitably loses strength to the point of generating the well-founded doubt that it could be expunged from the Caravaggio catalog. On Narcissus it seemed that critics, at least the more recent ones, had now settled on the name of Spadarino, although Palazzo Barberini continued to display the work under the name of Caravaggio, albeit followed by the question mark, a solution typically adopted when the scientific debate has not yet reached a solution, but the visitor is wanted to be told that the name suggested by the museum finds a certain consensus anyway. In the exhibition, the Narcissus appears instead as “attributed to Caravaggio,” without, however, the card in the catalog, compiled by an uncredited “MDM” among the authors of the cards (one assumes it is Michele Di Monte, an official of Palazzo Barberini), adding anything new in favor of a possible Caravaggesque authorship (indeed: the card closes with a summary of Gianni Papi’s proposal on Spadarino). The Mondafrutto, in the version of the Royal Collection, is instead presented as a sure autograph: it is certainly the best of the known versions, but it is much weaker than the works in the exhibition that stand next to it, and the card glosses over possible new arguments in favor of an authorship, if not certain, at least solid. Then, the chronology proposed in the exhibition, even if one really wants to consider the Mondafrutto an autograph, is really unconvincing, since it is considered to be a contemporary work to the Sick Bacchus that is exhibited next to it and that appears to be of noisily higher quality: the coeval dating seems to be a consequence of the fact that the exhibition finally incorporates the new features, introduced by the exhibition Caravaggio in Rome. A Life from Life in 2011, on the postponement of Caravaggio’s arrival in Rome, namely around 1595 and not 1592 as once believed. The Portrait of Maffeo Barberini , on the other hand, is derubricated as a painting “attributed to Caravaggio,” and the possibility of seeing the other Maffeo Barberini next to him certainly does not speak in favor of the Florentine painting.

The bookless Maffeo is one of the two big new additions to the exhibition, although it has been on display at Palazzo Barberini since late November. The other is theEcce Homo, which has been catalyzing everyone’s attention for a few years now, especially by virtue of the incredible affair of its rediscovery, and which can finally be seen for the first time by the Italian public, displayed on the back wall of the third room, next to the Flagellation of Naples and the David of the Galleria Borghese. On the Spanish work it is worth spending a few more words, since it is possible to consider it the authentic star of the exhibition, even though its location is not the happiest: in a backseat position, compressed between the corner of the wall and one of the most attention-grabbing paintings (the Flagellation), and with, in addition, an attendant who sits permanently in front of the work to check that the public does not take photographs (same for the Capture of Christ, another problematic painting discussed below: these are the only two works that visitors are not allowed to photograph, an incomprehensible prohibition even in light of the fame of the two paintings, of which endless reproductions now circulate). TheEcce Homo is presented as an autograph work: however, many elements should have suggested, at the very least, a little caution. We refer, in particular, to the relatively recent date of the discovery, to the fact that several scholars have not yet pronounced themselves on the work or have not taken a position (among them, a fact that seems rather interesting, even Francesca Cappelletti who, although curator of the exhibition, at least in the catalog does not s’expresses herself on the painting), to the presence of a few opposing voices(Manzitti, Spinosa, Vannugli) and to the general disagreement on the possible dating even among the few who have spoken out in favor of autography.Ecce Homo would thus be a work executed between Rome and Naples according to Papi and Christiansen, between the stay at the Colonna’s Latium fiefs and the early Neapolitan time according to Terzaghi, and a late work according to Porzio: it covers, in essence, a time span in which Caravaggio’s style underwent vertiginous changes. In the caption in the room and in the card in the catalog, it seems to be almost taken for granted that the visitor accepts the autography with fideistic conviction (the caption states thatEcce Homo “is one of the most recent acquisitions in Caravaggio’s catalog”), while the card refers to what has already been published in the 2023 volume devoted to the painting, without further additions. However, the debate around the work seems far from closed, not least because one should begin to avoid evading an issue on which it will be inevitable to position oneself in the future, namely the location of Genoa’sEcce Homo (and possibly the name of its author), a painting to which the Caravaggio 2025 catalog makes no mention. It is curious, moreover, to note how the technical evidence adduced for both the autography of the GenoeseEcce Homo and the autography of the SpanishEcce Homo is, in fact, the same: the engravings, detected in both versions, and indicated, even at the time of the conference on the Palazzo Bianco painting, as a typical feature of Caravaggio’s modus operandi . It will then be necessary to admit that either they are both autographs, or that the engraving is perhaps not a diriment element and that it could have been, if anything, a technical modality used by other artists of the time as well, as Rossella Vodret herself acknowledges (“the systematic use of engravings,” she writes in the catalog, “is not a characteristic of Caravaggio alone, many painters even of his time made use of them”). What then can be said for sure aboutEcce Homo? Perhaps, for now, not much more than what Claudio Strinati said in a video he posted on his Facebook page (“How is this painting? It is beautiful”).

However, there are other knots, which have emerged and been discussed in recent years (roughly between the Dentro Caravaggio exhibition and the current one), that the exhibition either skims over or does not address: for example, while touching on the subject of Caravaggio’s models (in Francesca Curti’s excellent essay, in other passages of the catalog, and in the apparatus of the second room, where the splendid St. Catherine from the Thyssen-Bornemisza in Madrid, the Detroit Martha and Magdalene , and the Judith and Holofernes from Palazzo Barberini, a work, the latterlatter, for which the curatorship accepts a date of about 1599-1600, without therefore considering the possibility of tying it to a note of 1602 read by some scholars who have expressed the most up-to-date positions on this issue, namely Cuppone, Papi and Vodret, as a payment for this painting), the Palermo Nativity is muted as a work that, given the wide consensus that the dating to 1600, thus the only altarpiece painted by Caravaggio in a jubilee year, has reached in recent years, should be part of the same group of paintings. The implications of a recent discovery (perhaps, however, precisely because of the freshness of the novelty) by Vincenzo Sorrentino, which has also been echoed in the generalist press, are not explored in depth: the discovery of a payment that would tie theAdoration of the Shepherds of Messina to a probable Neapolitan execution. The implications, in the case, would be considerable, since the number of Caravaggio’s Neapolitan works would grow, with all the consequences for local artists who may have seen theAdoration live and up close in Sicily today (although Giuseppe Porzio and Rossella Vodret in the catalog caution that Caravaggio may simply have executed the work in Sicily and been paid in Naples, while Christiansen, while talking about the work in the catalog, does not comment on the news). On the documents found by Sorrentino a further passage is appropriate, because this is a recent and important discovery: Indeed, one deduces that Caravaggio had arrived in Naples well before October 1609, as was thought until recently, if one considers that he had worked before November 27 on an altarpiece such as theAdoration of the Shepherds and, concurrently until October 31, the date of the first document of Caravaggio’s second Neapolitan sojourn, on at least one other painting for a hitherto unknown Genoese patron, Ippolita Cattaneo de Marini, who is otherwise unknown. And then, no mention is made, outside of a fleeting mention in a footnote, of “Magdalene Gregori,” the painting, which was recognized at a private Dutch collector in 2014, and which was the focus of an exhibition at the Musée Jacquemart-André in 2019, reopening the critical debate around a work that deserves to be explored in depth: it was one of the most interesting moments in recent Caravaggesque history.

Finally, among the works that perhaps need to be returned to, one could also include the National Gallery of Ireland’s The Capture of Christ , a painting with distinct Nordic accents (which would be a hapax in Caravaggio’s production), so much so that it previously figured attributed to Gerrit van Honthorst: Caravaggio 2025 has totally overlooked the discussion that arose following the recent exhibition, first in the rooms of Palazzo Chigi in Ariccia and then at the Fondazione Banco di Napoli between 2023 and 2024, of the Ruffo version of the Capture, a circumstance that has rekindled the debate on autography, among those who have pronounced in favor of the Calabrian specimen (Anna Coliva, who even proposed reassigning the Dublin version to Van Honthorst), those who instead lean toward the Irish work (Alessandro Zuccari), and those who instead consider them both autographs (Francesco Petrucci, with precedence given to the Ruffo version). It is therefore a pity that the exhibition, despite having a lot of recent material on which to discuss and despite presenting itself as “a unique opportunity to rediscover Caravaggio’s art in a new key, in an exhibition itinerary that integrates discoveries, critical reflections and a close comparison between his masterpieces,” ends up being at least lukewarm in terms of scientific innovations, which do not seem to be at the center of the exhibition.

Instead of the exhibition centered on novelties, with a few pieces perhaps combined with a few comparative works, preference was basically given to the solemn manifestation, the celebratory procession, the blockbuster able to move the masses, for which, however, a superficial itinerary is announced, almost all of which is marked by biographical descriptions, without real insights into the works. The audioguide itself, included in the 18 euros one has to pay to see the exhibition (which becomes 25 if one also wants to see the museum), does not add much more than the captions in the room: a few notes, mostly of a historical or iconographic nature. We are, after all, in the age of storytelling, we are interested in pure anecdotalism, we eschew formalism, we drive out context, we fight against any lunge on pure image values. And the works are the relics of the cult of Caravaggio: in the ground-floor rooms of the Palazzo Barberini we are content to reverence them in the midst of the fray, to contemplate them only to be sucked into the whirlpool of other worshippers, to adore them as they float on a light that flattens them and makes them look like backlit displays , especially in the first two rooms. It is then taken for granted that the public, having left here, will go looking for Caravaggio in the churches and museums of Rome on their own, since neither the audio guide nor the panels on site suggest routes into the city, either to see Caravaggio or to delve into the context of the early seventeenth century. It is not surprising, then, that Rome’s churches have not provided for extensions of their often cramped or prohibitively long hours for the exhibition (Santa Maria del Popolo, for example, allows barely an hour and a half, from 4:30 to 6 p.m., on holidays, and little more on weekdays, that is, from 8:30 to 9:45 a.m., 10:30 to noon and 4 to 6 p.m.).

Of course, there are also merits, and the exhibition is certainly worth a visit, perhaps even a repeat visit. One cannot refrain from expressing gratitude to the curators for gathering in Rome works that would otherwise not be easily accessible, at a time in history when loans of such magnitude are becoming increasingly rare and complicated: the chance to see gathered together some 20 paintings by Caravaggio, some of which have come from afar, is the main reason to see the exhibition. It should not be, but it is: the works are here, and the visit is therefore to be encouraged. It is exciting to be able to see, side by side, in close comparison, the Buona ventura from the Pinacoteca Capitolina and the Bari from Fort Worth: after all, it is more convenient to go to Rome than to Texas to see the masterpiece that Cardinal Del Monte bought from the workshop of the junk dealer Costantino Spada and effectively introduced him to Caravaggio. It is fascinating to see Ottavio Costa’s paintings all together again, eight years later: the Palazzo Barberini’s Judith thus reunites with the St. Francis from Hartford and the St. John the Baptist from Kansas City, a Genoese convergence that it would have been nice to see explored precisely in the light of the common commission, perhaps even keeping in mind the beautiful Albenga copy that is central to understanding the relationship between Caravaggio and the wealthy Ligurian banker. The comparison of theEcce Homo, whether one wants to believe the autography or not, the Flagellation and the David, with the exhilarating presence, on the adjoining wall, of the Supper at Emmaus from the Pinacoteca di Brera, is captivating and heartening. And worth the trip would be only the Conversion from the Odescalchi collection, the first version of the homologous painting in the Cerasi Chapel, a painting that is difficult to access and that even scholars struggle to see, and the Saint Catherine from the Thyssen-Bornemisza: it is illuminated by too strong a light, but one reasons that the Madrid museum hardly lends it, and so one is seduced by that canvas that was among Cardinal Del Monte’s favorites.

It may be that in the end considerations about the exhibition’s shortcomings give way under the strength of the works. It may be that we tend to forget the fact that, in these rooms, Caravaggio plummets like a monad. That his modernity, as it is presented to us, seems almost to be the result of a celestial genius, a romantic legacy that the exhibition, by resetting the context, does not help to dispel. That on some of the paintings the consensus is far from unanimous, whatever they say. So in the end we allow ourselves to be enchanted by the paintings. At least as long as we are allowed by other visitors who gasp, press and push for their share of sacred illumination.

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