Hidden Caravaggio on show at last in Rome – but not for long

A portrait of an aristocrat by ­Caravaggio, which has never been seen in public before, has gone on show in Rome after a deal was struck with its secretive owner.

A visitor looks at a portrait of Maffeo Barberini by Italian master Caravaggio at the Gallerie Nazionali di Arte Antica in the Barberini Palace in Rome. It is the first time the painting has been on public display

A portrait of an aristocrat by ­Caravaggio, which has never been seen in public before, has gone on show in Rome.

It will be on display for only three months after a deal was struck with its secretive owner.

First identified as a Caravaggio in 1963 by an expert who found it in the collection of a family in Florence, the portrait of Maffeo Barberini, the future Pope Urban VIII, was photographed at the time but has only been viewed up close by five or six art historians.

The unnamed family, who shunned publicity, have been persuaded to show the work at the National Gallery of Antique Art, which is in the Barberini family’s palazzo in Rome.

“Many have tried to get this painting, it’s the Caravaggio masterpiece everyone has wanted to see for 60 years,” said Thomas Clement Salomon, the gallery director who persuaded the family to hand over the work.

One of the few late 16th-century portraits by Caravaggio which has not been lost, the work shows Barberini gesturing at someone, his outstretched hand highlighted against the artist’s trademark shaded background. His eyes are slightly misaligned, making his stare intense, an effect increased by the pinpoint reflections of light on the eyes.

“Caravaggio can freeze a moment. It’s hypnotic, magnetic and it’s coming home,” said Paola Nicita, an art historian who worked on the loan.

Roberto Longhi, an art critic who first announced the discovery of the work in 1963, learnt that the family had bought it from a curator of the Barberini family’s art collection, which was broken up in the 1930s.

Maffeo Barberini knew Caravaggio as a young man in the 1590s and is known to have sat for him and bought art from him. “Maffeo was a poet, and an ambitious intellectual who discovered the sculptor Bernini,” said Nicita.

“I believe it was painted in 1598 because Barberini’s hand gesture is similar to Christ’s in Caravaggio’s Calling of St Matthew, also painted that year,” she added.

Ms Nicita said it was likely that the work had got lost in the Barberini collection, and said that when the family bought it they did not know it was by Caravaggio. “If it went on sale today in the US it would go for $US120m to $US130m,” said Mr Salomon.

The Times