Italy acquired “The Portrait of Monsignor Maffeo Barberini” by Caravaggio for 30 Million Euro

Upon completion of the required administrative procedures, the painting will become part of the Italian State’s patrimony and will be assigned to the Gallerie Nazionali di Arte Antica in Rome, entering permanently into the collections of Palazzo Barberini.

“After more than a year of negotiations, today we announce the acquisition by the Ministry of Culture of an extraordinary masterpiece by Caravaggio, the Portrait of Monsignor Maffeo Barberini. This work, attributed to the Master by Roberto Longhi, is of exceptional importance and is now being made fully accessible to the public and to the international scholarly community, only a few months after its first exhibition in a museum, held at Palazzo Barberini. This acquisition, together with the recent one of the Ecce Homo by Antonello da Messina, forms part of a broader project to strengthen the national cultural heritage, which the Ministry of Culture will continue to pursue in the coming months, with the aim of making masterpieces of art history—otherwise destined for the private market—accessible to scholars and enthusiasts. I would like to thank all the institutions, officials and specialists who worked with great expertise and dedication to achieve a result of such significance,” declared the Minister of Culture Alessandro Giuli.

The acquisition, concluded for the sum of 30 million euros after a lengthy negotiation, represents one of the most significant investments ever made by the Italian State for the purchase of a work of art and testifies to the commitment of the Ministry of Culture to strengthening public collections with works of outstanding importance in the history of art.

During the negotiation process, thanks to an agreement with the owners, the painting was displayed to the public in the galleries of Palazzo Barberini for several months, from November 2024 until the conclusion of the major exhibition Caravaggio 2025, which welcomed more than 450,000 visitors. On that occasion, Italian and international scholars unanimously confirmed the attribution to Caravaggio, emphasizing the exceptional importance of the painting.

The Portrait of Monsignor Maffeo Barberini depicts the future Pope Urban VIII (1568–1644) at around thirty years of age, dressed as a cleric of the Apostolic Chamber, at a crucial moment in his rise to power. The work was first brought to scholarly attention by Roberto Longhi in the celebrated article Il vero “Maffeo Barberini” del Caravaggio, published in the journal Paragone in 1963, and has since been widely recognized by scholars as an autograph work by Merisi. Longhi himself identified the painting as one of the founding moments of modern portraiture, noting how Caravaggio introduced a new psychological intensity and an extraordinary ability to convey the living presence of the sitter without resorting to rhetorical elements.

Within the limited corpus of works securely attributed to Caravaggio—around sixty-five paintings worldwide—portraits constitute an extremely rare category: only three are known and universally accepted. The Portrait of Monsignor Maffeo Barberini therefore represents an exceptional example of the Lombard master’s portraiture and a fundamental piece for understanding the evolution of his pictorial language between the late sixteenth and the early seventeenth centuries.

Caravaggio is today one of the most studied and admired artists in the world, yet the number of securely attributed works remains extremely limited, and the appearance on the market of paintings confidently attributed to him is an exceedingly rare event. For this reason, the entry of the Portrait of Monsignor Maffeo Barberini into Italy’s public collections represents a result of great importance both from a scholarly perspective and in terms of cultural policy, ensuring that a masterpiece by Caravaggio becomes part of the national heritage and further strengthens opportunities for research, knowledge and public enjoyment of the artist’s work.

This acquisition also holds particular symbolic value for the Gallerie Nazionali di Arte Antica. At Palazzo Barberini, the painting will enter into dialogue with the museum’s other works by Caravaggio and with one of the most important collections of Caravaggesque painting in the world, in particular with Judith Beheading Holofernes, which was likewise acquired by the Italian State in 1971. That acquisition marked a decisive moment in the modern rediscovery of the painter and contributed to strengthening the presence of Caravaggio’s works in Italian public collections.

More than fifty years later, the arrival of the Portrait of Monsignor Maffeo Barberini represents another significant moment in the policies aimed at expanding the public heritage and strengthening the national museum system, offering new opportunities for the study and appreciation of Caravaggio’s work.