Italy Pays $34.7 Million for a Rare Caravaggio Portrait — and Keeps It in Rome
Italy has made one of its most significant single-artwork purchases in recent memory, acquiring a rare painting attributed to Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (Italian, 1571–1610) for $34.7 million. The work, “Portrait of Monsignor Maffeo Barberini” (circa 1598), will enter the permanent collection of Palazzo Barberini in Rome, home to the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Antica.
The acquisition follows more than a year of negotiations with the previous owners, a private collection in Florence. With the deal, the Italian culture ministry advances a broader policy goal: keeping major works by Italian masters in the country and ensuring public access to them.
The portrait depicts Maffeo Barberini — the churchman who would later become Pope Urban VIII in 1623 — in a green clerical cloak. He clutches papers in one hand while extending the other arm outward, a pose that reads as both administrative and quietly theatrical, in keeping with Caravaggio’s ability to charge a seemingly straightforward likeness with psychological presence.
Although the painting is dated to the years between 1598 and 1603, its status as a Caravaggio is relatively recent. It was attributed to the artist in 1963 by the influential art historian Roberto Longhi, a key figure in the 20th-century reassessment of Caravaggio’s legacy. Since that attribution, the work has been exhibited only once.
That single public appearance took place at Palazzo Barberini in 2024, when the painting was shown ahead of a three-month presentation dedicated to Caravaggio. It has remained on view at the palace since the exhibition, and the new purchase formalizes its long-term home there.
At Palazzo Barberini, the portrait will be displayed alongside other works by Caravaggio in the museum’s holdings, including “Narcissus” (1597–99) and “Judith Beheading Holofernes.” The pairing is likely to sharpen the institution’s narrative of the artist’s early Roman years, placing an intimate portrait of a rising ecclesiastical power in dialogue with the painter’s more dramatic, psychologically charged scenes.
The purchase also arrives amid a renewed push by the Italian state to secure culturally significant works before they leave the country. Last month, the ministry acquired a double-sided work by Italian Renaissance painter Antonello da Messina (Italian, circa 1430–1479), which had been discovered in a French attic in 2014. The Antonello was acquired in a private sale in June 2019, just two days before it was scheduled to go to auction with an estimate of $110 million to $170 million.
With “Portrait of Monsignor Maffeo Barberini,” Italy is not only making a major financial commitment — it is consolidating a rare, newly secured anchor for Rome’s Caravaggio story, one that the public can now expect to encounter as a permanent fixture rather than a fleeting loan.
