Caravaggio 2025

The National Gallery of Ancient Art in Palazzo Barberini in collaboration with the Borghese Gallery and in concomitance with the Jubilee 2025 celebrations, hosts the monographic exhibition Caravaggio 2025 curated by Francesca Cappelletti, Maria Cristina Terzaghi and Thomas Clement Salomon.

The project, one of the most important dedicated to Michelangelo Merisi known as Caravaggio (1571-1610), offers a journey with an exceptional number of autograph paintings, together with works that are difficult to see and new discoveries in one of the places symbolic of the bond between the artist and his patrons. By bringing together some of the most famous works, alongside others less known but equally significant by the great master in fact, the exhibition represents a new and in-depth reflection on Merisi's artistic and cultural revolution, investigating in a very broad context all the innovative aspects that he introduced into the artistic, religious and social panorama of his time.

The exhibition is developed in different thematic sections that explore various aspects of Caravaggio's production. All the masterpieces presented allow us to highlight the innovation of Caravaggio's language, with that characteristic use of light that pierces his representations of sacred or profane themes, and which opens up new avenues for the interpretation of truth. These aspects can be seen not only in religious dramas, such as in the theatricality of the Capture of Christ from the National Gallery of Ireland in Dublin, but also in portraits, such as the Portrait of Maffeo Barberini from a private collection, placed for the first time in comparison with the other paintings of the Master and fully considered the first modern portrait or the Ecce Homo, currently exhibited at the Prado Museum in Madrid which returns to Italy for the first time in centuries.

Among the other works on display we remember other exceptional loans such as the Saint Catherine of Alexandria from the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum in Madrid, a masterpiece already in the Barberini collections which returns to the Palace that housed it, and Martha and Magdalene from the Detroit Institute of Arts, for which the artist used the same model as the Judith preserved in Palazzo Barberini, all displayed side by side for the first time. The exhibition is also an opportunity to see together again the three paintings commissioned by the banker Ottavio Costa, Judith and Holofernes from Palazzo Barberini, the Saint John the Baptist from the Nelson-Atkins Museum in Kansas City and the Saint Francis in Ecstasy from the Wadsworth Atheneum of Art in Hartford, and works linked to the history of the Barberini collecting, such as the Card Sharps from the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth, which returns to the Roman palace where it was long kept. The exhibition ends with the Martyrdom of Saint Orsola, Merisi's last masterpiece, painted shortly before his death in Porto Ercole, an important loan granted by Intesa Sanpaolo.

The exhibition is accompanied by a wonderful catalog published by Marsilio Arte, which delves into the themes of the exhibition itinerary by presenting new critical studies, with essays by some of the major international experts, which underlines the key points of Caravaggio's biography, the evolution of his style and above all the context that influenced his art, presenting new interpretations and reflections on his cultural heritage.

Photo: Saint Catherine of Alexandria, oil on canvas (1598-99), Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum, Madrid