A Rare Caravaggio Portrait Was Hidden Away for Years. Now, Visitors Can See It in Person for the First Time

More than 60 years ago, art historians attributed a rare portrait to Caravaggio, the celebrated Baroque painter known for his vividly realistic artwork. But the piece has never been publicly displayed—until now.

Completed in the early 1600s, the portrait depicts Monsignor Maffeo Barberini, who would later become Pope Urban VIII. Thanks to the work of some determined museum officials, the painting is currently on display inside its subject’s own mansion, at the National Galleries of Ancient Art in Rome’s Palazzo Barberini.

“This is the portrait by Caravaggio that everyone wanted to see for decades,” Thomas Clement Salomon, the director of the National Galleries of Ancient Art, tells the New York Times’ Elisabetta Povoledo. “I had spoken to many people, and they all said it was impossible.”

But Salomon persisted, eventually convincing the portrait’s anonymous owner to loan the piece to the museum.

Caravaggio’s Portrait of Monsignor Maffeo Barberini shows its subject seated in a wooden chair wearing a shiny green robe and black biretta, appearing to be interacting with someone on his right. The painting “plays on light and shadow,” as art historian Paola Nicita, co-curator of “Caravaggio: the Portrait Unveiled,” tells Agence France-Presse.

“The heart of the painting lies in the hands: the left hand clutching a letter … and the right hand emerging from the painting, entering our space,” Nicita adds. “This marvellous gesture of the outstretched right hand is very reminiscent of the gesture of Christ in The Calling of Saint Matthew,” which Caravaggio painted around 1600.

The Italian painter was often inspired by Christianity, including dramatic and sometimes violent Bible stories in his art: Some of his more famous works include Judith Beheading Holofernes (circa 1599) and The Conversion of Saint Paul (circa 1601).

Born in 1571, Caravaggio spent much of his life in Rome, where he built a career as a painter. The young artist’s work stood out for its unique chiaroscuro, masterfully contrasting light and shadow to create dramatic, three-dimensional images.

The Portrait of Monsignor Maffeo Barberini was first attributed to Caravaggio in 1963 by art historian Roberto Longhi, according to a Facebook post from the museum. As Longhi wrote in the journal Paragone, the piece is essential to understanding Caravaggio’s portrait painting—an artistic genre for which he’s less well-known.

“This work is fundamental because you can count the number of portraits by Caravaggio on the fingers of one hand,” Salomon tells the Art Newspaper’s James Imam. “Showing this work 60 years after experts first attributed the work to Caravaggio is something incredible.”

While the portrait’s attribution to Caravaggio is generally unchallenged, experts can’t be completely sure that its subject is indeed Barberini. As Salomon and Nicita tell the Times, the portrait was not accompanied by documentation, but it was likely sold with pieces of the Barberini estate when it was dispersed in the 1930s.

Italian culture ministry officials hope they will be able to persuade the owners of Portrait of Monsignor Maffeo Barberini to sell the painting to the museum, so it can remain on public display among the palazzo’s other Caravaggio works, per the Times.

“Only very few specialists since the 1960s have had the opportunity to see [the portrait] in person,” as Nicita tells Reuters’ Cristiano Corvino and Alvise Armellini. “It is one thing to know the painting from photographs and another to see it in person and realize its quality—its almost magnetic power.”

“Caravaggio: the Portrait Unveiled” is on display at the Palazzo Barberini in Rome through February 23, 2025.

Sonja Anderson | READ MORE

Sonja Anderson is a writer and reporter based in New York City.