Art & Design | Caravaggio, Baroque’s Bad Boy, Gets a Blockbuster Show in Rome
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Two dozen works from museums and private collectors around the world are on display, with some reunited for the first time in centuries.
“Caravaggio 2025,” at the National Gallery of Ancient Art at the Palazzo Barberini in Rome, tracks the artist’s meteoric career. Credit… Alberto Novelli and Alessio Panunzi/Gallerie Nazionali di Arte Antica – Palazzo Barberini March 7, 2025, 12:01 a.m. ET
Some 430 years after the Lombard artist Michelangelo Merisi, better known as Caravaggio, swept into Rome to enchant, and land, well-placed patrons with his bold yet intimate artistry, Caravaggio is again grabbing the spotlight, with a blockbuster exhibition at the National Gallery of Ancient Art at Palazzo Barberini.
Chronologically organized, the exhibition, titled “Caravaggio 2025,” tracks the artist’s meteoric career from his arrival in Rome, when he could only afford to use himself as a model, to more flush times, when he was feted by wealthy bankers and cardinals, to his final years on the run, after killing a man, and attempting through art to gain a papal pardon.
Thomas Clement Salomon, the director of the National Gallery, said that with its four Caravaggios and what he called the most important collection of Caravaggesque paintings in the world, the institution was a natural choice to host a Caravaggio extravaganza.
Back to the palazzo after centuries away are three works — “The Cardsharps,” owned by the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth; “Concert” (or “The Musicians”), from the Metropolitan Museum in New York; and “St. Catherine of Alexandria,” from the Thyssen-Bornemisza National Museum in Madrid — that were once part of the collection of Cardinal Antonio Barberini, one long-ago resident of the 17th-century palace.
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“The Cardsharps,” owned by the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth, is on loan to the show. It was once part of the collection of Cardinal Antonio Barberini, who resided at the palazzo where it is now on display. Credit… Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth, Texas More than 60,000 tickets have already been sold to the exhibition, which opens Friday and will run through July 6, a testament both to the appeal of Caravaggio’s fierce originality as well as his reputation as Baroque’s sword-bearing bad boy.
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