Portrait of Maffeo Barberini by Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio
The papal Caravaggio portrait purchased by the Italian state for €30 million earlier this year will now go on public display at the Italian Senate.
Starting on May 28th, Michelangelo da Caravaggio’s 1598 painting Portrait of Monsignor Maffeo Barberini will be displayed at the Palazzo della Minerva, which houses the Senate library. This is the first time the painting has been displayed to the public since the Italian government purchased it earlier this year. The painting first came to public attention through the Palazzo Barberini’s Caravaggio retrospective, which ran from March to July 2025. It became a blockbuster exhibition due to its size. With twenty-four of the Baroque master’s sixty-five surviving paintings included in the show, it became the largest Caravaggio exhibition since the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s The Age of Caravaggio in 1985. But the show attracted large crowds partly due to the Barberini portrait. After the exhibition closed, over 400,000 people had visited. The Italian government decided to buy the painting for €30 million (or about $34.7 million). It is one of the largest sums ever paid by the state for a work of art.
At the time the portrait was created, Maffeo Barberini was a young man starting a successful career in the Church. He had earned a law degree in Pisa and would be named the papal ambassador to France in a few years. In due time, he would ascend to the papacy in 1623 as Urban VIII. While his nepotism and lavish spending left the Church in considerable debt, Urban VIII’s papacy marked the height of Baroque art and its patronage by the Church. He was especially known for commissioning works by artists such as Bernini, Poussin, and Lorrain.
The Barberini portrait is now on display alongside selections from the Italian State archives pertaining to the troubled life of Caravaggio. The artist had frequent run-ins with the law and sometimes had to flee to escape prosecution. Included alongside the painting is an interrogation record written the same year as the portrait’s creation. Caravaggio had been detained for carrying a sword. The authorities noted that at the time, he was a painter in the service of Cardinal Francesco Maria del Monte, who provided him with rooms at his palace in Rome, the Palazzo Madama. This building is now the seat of the Italian Senate. The Senate’s president, Ignazio La Russa, noted that bringing the Barberini portrait to the Senate library in the Palazzo della Minerva is a sort of “temporary homecoming.” Italy’s culture minister, Alessandro Giuli, further commented on the state’s purchase of the portrait, saying that the purpose was to acquire “works of exceptional importance before they are absorbed by the circuits of international private collecting”.
This is not the first time that the Senate has displayed a painting acquired by the state. Most recently, the Italian government bought a painting by the Renaissance master Antonello da Messina from Sotheby’s. Created around 1460, Ecce Homo was intended to be featured in Sotheby’s Old Masters Week at the beginning of February. However, the painting was withdrawn, and soon after, the Italian government announced that it had bought the work for $14.9 million. The state displayed the painting at the Palazzo della Minerva from March 27th to April 19th. There was also a good amount of controversy over the culture ministry’s decision to select the National Museum of Abruzzo as Ecce Homo’s final destination. Many thought that the more appropriate choice would be a museum in Messina, the Sicilian city where the artist came from. The fact that the current government is primarily composed of right-wing parties from the more prosperous north may provide some insight into why a Sicilian treasure would be kept far from the island of its creation. Giuli explained that the National Museum in L’Aquila seemed like an obvious choice given its status as the 2026 Italian culture capital. Ecce Homo will be taken on a tour of Italy, where it will be briefly exhibited in Messina before being sent to L’Aquila.
Caravaggio’s Portrait of Monsignor Maffeo Barberini will be on display at the Palazzo della Minerva through June 21st.