It's Easter week, the year of the jubilee and the caravaggio season to all in Rome. More than half of the artist's surviving works are currently and exceptionally in the city that formed and loved it. In the magnificent monograph exhibition by Palazzo Barberini Caravage 2025Two dozen paintings tell the deeply moving story of its brief revolutionary and rapidly evolving work; They include rare loans, unprecedented unity groups dispersed on continents and operate entirely new in Caravaggio shows.
15 Other paintings allow a caravaggio path, which visitors can design as they wish, extending from the first wonders of the Borghese gallery and Doria Pamphilj – the succulent leak “Boy with a basket of fruit”, the score and the refined rest on Egypt “, where Joseph made a score for the violation and, the most monumental of all, Christ “of the Vatican, the heavy dead body being apparently lowered in our space by tears tilted and bent in wrestling visibly with its weight.
Even the faithful of Caravaggio will make discoveries at the Barberini, starting with a charismatic and suave “Maffo Barberini” (1598) in the copper green helmet, a reflective white head pinch on his eyes giving his gaze a dazzling intensity while he extends over the arm with a sudden impatient gesture, conversing through the centuries. The individualism and the ambition of two young arrivals withdrawing from Rome – Caravaggio, born in Milan, was then 27 years old; The Barberini Florentin, later Pope Urban VIII, only 30 years old – shines with this daringly intimate portrait, never presented himself publicly until Palazzo Barberini posted it last fall to announce this exhibition.
Another newcomer, the controversial “eccce homo” – Pilate leaning uncomfortably through a balcony in our space, trying to read the crowd; A torturer with open mouth in the shade – is not allocated in a catalog of auctions in Madrid in 2021, estimates € 1,500. Quickly accepted as an autograph work, he would have sold 36 million euros and was loaned in 2024 to Prado; It is its inaugural display in a caravading show, to judge alongside known masterpieces.
Mainly organized chronologically, Barberini's exhibition opens onto the challenge of the first challenge of Caravaggio to the Roman Renaissance: the cacophonated altarpiece “the conversion of Saul” (1600-01), then commanded by the Tiberio Cerasi law. The extreme physical rendering of Jesus, immersing with force in natural reality, towards Saul in a chaos of tangled limbs, thrown clothes, helmets, rustling tail of horse and breeding head, was incredibly daring in 1600: Caravaggio had brought the divine into our terrestrial world.
In the Cerasi chapel of Santa Maria del Popolo is “conversion on the way of Damascus”, the delight of the rejection of rejection, which was accepted: Saul, flat on the ground, shortcut of the head, the arms stretched in the astonishment, overshadowed by the halet of his huge horse Skewbald. In 1958, the poet Thom Gunn wrote on the expectation of light in this dark chapel, looking at “the great gesture of the lonely / resistant man, kissing, nothing”. One of the reasons for the contemporary attraction of caravan is that skeptics and believers relate to his religious paintings.
With such works, Caravaggio broke the distinctions of the high Renaissance between idealized artifice and daily life. Classic inspiration has remained – at the Barberini, the figure of the distant adolescent “Saint John the Baptist” (1604-06) quotes the ancient statue of the “dying Gaul”, although the gross hands and neck and the neck be those of a laboratory – but Caravaggio has also taken models of the streets of Rome. All his characters are suitable as beings of flesh and blood, in an art of mystical realism which has given visual biblical texts and infused all the fabrics, secular and sacred, with eternal dramas of destiny, innocence and violence, hope and despair.
He is already there in the worldly feverish paints made for the first boss of Cardinal Cardinal Caravage Francesco Maria Del Monte in 1596-97, hung at the entrance to Barberini with “Saul”. Each favorite companion of Caravaggio features, the blushing boy with lips painted mouing nicknamed Cecco de Caravaggio, and undermines the pleasure of distrust. The charming naive is deceived in “The Fortune Teller” – the Gitan surreptitiously removes his ring – and in the game of chance and the deception “The Cardharps”. In the voluptuous of the Metropolitan Museum “The Musicians”, where Cupid is probably posed by Cecco, a livre scratching to a Madrigal frame of Sonnet de Jacopo Sannazaro on young pride – “Icarus fell here, these waves know it”.
Opposite, Cecco reappears, barely changed, like the angel in the brilliant nocturnal “Saint Francis of Assisi en Extasse”, the first religious painting of Caravaggio, also commissioned by Del Monte, which is described as “the holy musicians”.
A joy at the Barberini is the first strong works, straightening the recent exhibitions which emphasize late carage. A gathering of stars is the paintings 1598-1600, from Madrid, Detroit and Rome, modeled by the courtesan Sienne Fillide Melandroni. Its assertive character, its delicate but determined characteristics, its wide eyes and its high cheekbones, and its exquisite modes, lend the sacred story the personal load and the glamor of the portraits.
Majestic in Lapis Lazuli Bleu et Or in “Saint Catherine d'Alexandrie”, she caresses the sword of martyrdom as a tender lover. In “Martha and Mary Magdalene”, her clearly dressed and serious sister radiates a divine light, falling on the Madeleine in rich purple and crimson; Melandroni's expression convincingly mixes pride, resistance, regret, zero faith.
Then, almost amazed by his own power, Melandroni is a “Tripper Judith in Holoferne” resolved, his beauty contrasts with his old graying servant and the Assyrian general, shouting at the time between life and death.
In this pivotal painting, the juvenile brightness of Caravaggio turns into a mature chiaroscuro theatricality with which it was enlightened, of haunted darkness, acute moments of choice or moral recognition, physical agony or terror.
They take place from 1603-10, becoming darker, more compacted, after 1606, while he was on the run for murder: Judas Kiss, John's Flight, Jesus's Quiescence, Caravaggio himself an impatient spectator, in “The taking of Christ”; The “supper from Milan to Emmaus” with its meager still dead nature, its intentional apostles and its curious innns incomprehensible; The beheaded head, another self -portrait, still screaming, in “David with the head of Goliath”; Finally, the arrow piercing the breast so quickly that the victim and the attacker seem almost perplexed in “the martyrdom of Saint Ursula”.
Beyond the show, wandering from the church to the church, you barely need a map – crowds teeming at the entrances signal the great overtaking of caravaggio still in their original sites. In San Luigi Dei Francesi is the cycle of Saint Matthew, starting with the distinguished tax collector to be apostle while he is sitting in an animated inn; Pope Francis remembers visiting these paintings frequently as a young clerk. At the Di Sant'Agostino basilica, two euros in a piece slit illuminate the “Madonna of the pilgrim”, the child and the mother huddles in a door, adored by some tatters in tatters, with dirty clothes and bare feet, inevitably recalling the homeless encountered in the streets of Rome today. The city is a sanctuary for many great timeless artists, but none takes the breath of life around us like caravaggio.
As of July 6, Caravaggio2025.Barberinicorsini.org
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