gave Portrait of Monsignor Maffeo Barberini A painting by Baroque master Caravaggio that has long been privately owned and only loaned out for public display once was acquired by the Italian state for 30 million euros ($35 million). It is the result of more than a year of negotiations between the Ministry of Culture and the anonymous owners.
Painted around 1599, this portrait captures Maffeo Vincenzo Barberini when he was 30 years old and a visiting scholar of the Apostolic Chamber. His uncle Francesco’s great success in business had elevated the Barberini family from minor Florentine nobility to major players in Rome, complete with titles and offices bought and paid for by the Catholic Church. He managed to evade the Curia’s rules against running a business while holding an ecclesiastical office, and so did his heirs, including his nephew. This ensured that Maffeo had endless funds to support his rapid rise up 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 around 1935 when financial distress forced the family to sell its unparalleled collection. It was bought by a private collection in Florence and remained there, missing and unpublished, for decades. It was first published in 1963 by art historian Roberto Longhi as Caravaggio’s autograph work. The owners then kept it completely behind closed doors for another 60 years.
The portrait was finally shown to the public for the first time in 2024 when the owners loaned it to the Galleria Nazionale di Arte Antica (National Galleries of Ancient Art) in Rome for an exhibition dedicated to the work. The museum is housed in the Palazzo Barberini, the grand civic palace designed by Gian Lorenzo Bernini for Maffeo after Peter ascended the throne, so the 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 make another naval home and this time it will stay for good. The work will be assigned to the Galerie Nazionali di Arte Antica to become part of the permanent collections of the Palazzo Barberini.
Within the limited corpus of works securely attributed to Caravaggio—about sixty-five paintings worldwide—portraits are an extremely rare category: only three are known and universally accepted. The portrait of Monsignor Maffeo Barberini is therefore an exceptional example of portraiture by a Lombard master and a fundamental piece for understanding the evolution of his pictorial language between the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.
Caravaggio is one of the most studied and admired artists in the world today, yet the number of securely attributed works is extremely limited, and confidently attributed to him on the market for paintings is an extremely rare occurrence. For this reason, the entry of the portrait of Monsignor Maffeo Barberini into the public collections of Italy is a result of great importance from an academic point of view and cultural policy, ensuring that a masterpiece by Caravaggio becomes part of the national heritage and enriching opportunities for research, knowledge and public enjoyment of the artist’s work.
