Italy’s culture ministry has purchased a rare and long-hidden portrait by the Baroque painter Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio for €30 million ($34.7 million). The transaction marks one of the country’s most significant investments in a single artwork and is among the highest recorded prices paid for a work by the artist.
Titled Portrait of Monsignor Maffeo Barberini (circa 1598), the painting will enter the permanent collection of the Palazzo Barberini in Rome, which is home to the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Antica. The landmark acquisition comes following more than a year of negotiations with the previous owners, a private collection in Florence.
Portrait of Monsignor Maffeo Barberini depicts the future pope Maffeo Barberini, adorned with a green cleric’s cloak and clutching papers with his other arm outstretched. Barberini was appointed Pope Urban VIII in 1623. The work was painted between 1598 and 1603, but it was only attributed to the great Italian painter in 1963 by the art historian Roberto Longhi. Since its attribution to Caravaggio, the painting has only been exhibited once, at the Palazzo Barberini in 2024, ahead of a three-month show dedicated to the artist. It has remained on view there since the show, and will now be displayed alongside the museum’s other works by Caravaggio, including Narcissus (1597–99), and Judith Beheading Holofernes (1598–99).
The acquisition by the Italian culture ministry is part of a larger move to ensure works by great Italian artists remain in the country and are accessible to the public. Last month, the Italian ministry purchased a double-sided work by Italian Renaissance painter Antonello da Messina for $14.9 million in a private sale at Sotheby’s in New York in an effort to block the work from appearing at auction.
“This acquisition, together with the recent acquisition of Antonello da Messina's Ecce Homo, is part of a broader project to strengthen the national cultural heritage that the Ministry of Culture will continue to pursue in the coming months, with the aim of making some art history masterpieces accessible to scholars and enthusiasts that would otherwise be destined for the private market,” said Alessandro Giuli, the Italian minister of culture, in a press statement.
The highest price ever associated with a work by Caravaggio is for Judith and Holofernes (1599), which was discovered in a French attic in 2014. In June 2019, just two days before it was set to go to auction with an estimate of $110 million to $170 million, it was acquired in a private sale.
