Caravaggio 2025 at Palazzo Barberini: Part I
This spring’s big ticket in Rome is the Caravaggio exhibition at Palazzo Barberini which opened in March and will run to early July. It is rapidly selling out and is a glorious gallop through twenty-four paintings, including a couple of less than certain attributions, but there is not a dud amongst them. A dizzying battery of beauty crammed into Palazzo Barberini’s (too?) small exhibition space. With the loans in Rome for the show, and those paintings already in churches and museums across the city, some two-thirds of Caravaggio’s entire oeuvre is presently in town. I have become more than a little carried away thinking about the dense show so this is Part 1. Part 2 will be coming next week.
Before beginning, I must admit I find such exhibitions provoke certain (possibly bah humbug-ish) misgivings: permanent collections including the exquisite Palazzo Barberini are empty for most of the year, even as the exhibition queues gather below its great Salone with Pietro da Cortona’s glorious and vast ceiling; the exhibition could undoubtedly have been better displayed in a larger space; stripping galleries around the world of one or more of their star pieces is unfair on their visitors; moving paintings around the world takes no small toll on the health of the paintings. Despite understanding that it is a complicated business, I could also be a little grumpy (and I’m certainly not alone) about the lighting but, my innate cheerfulness returning, I would say the paintings are all in town now. If you can I would urge you to go and see them!
In 1571, probably on the 29th September—Michelmas, the Feast of the Archangels, hence his name—Michelangelo Merisi was born in Milan. His father, Fermo, worked in the city as an administrator in the household of the Marquis of Caravaggio. In 1576 the family fled plague-ravaged Milan for the town of Caravaggio, the epithet by which the then infant Michelangelo Merisi would become celebrated beyond imagining. The family’s efforts were, however, in vain and the young Michelangelo’s father, uncle and grandfather all died of plague at Caravaggio the following year.
Caravaggio’s childhood, then, played out under a brooding cloud of plague, famine, and desolation and by the time he was eighteen his mother had died too and he was an orphan. For Charles Borromeo, then the fire and brimstone Archbishop of Milan, the plague had been sent to Milan as divine punishment. It is difficult to see how a child growing up in such an environment could fail to be enormously affected by it.
Already at the age of twelve Caravaggio was apprenticed in Milan to the painter Simone Peterzano, who claimed to have trained under Titian. After his apprenticeship and following the death of his mother, Caravaggio sold a piece of land he had inherited which may have funded travels in Lombardy, perhaps even as far as Venice where he would surely have seen the work of Giorgione, as well as Titian and Tintoretto.
The Palazzo Barberini show begins with what happened next. Caravaggio was in his early twenties when he arrived in Rome. The city was then home to perhaps a hundred thousand people, densely packed into the shadowy, narrow vicoli of the Field of Mars and Trastevere. The vast majority of the population occupied a corner of what had once been the imperial capital; sheep grazed amid the ruins of its long-abandoned civic hub in the Forum; and the centre of gravity of the Caput Mundi had shifted to the Vatican. For, despite its massively diminished size, the presence of the Church made Rome still a major capital. Far more significant than its population suggested, it attracted princes and paupers from across Europe and in Jubilee years the pilgrim population was larger than that of the city’s residents.
Upon arriving in Rome from Lombardy, Caravaggio was initially a guest of Monsignor Pandolfo Pucci of Recanati in the Marche. Pucci appears to have lived up to the marchigiana stereotype of tightness, and was known as Monsignor Insalata for the poor quality of the food in his household.
The Boy Peeling Fruit, here on loan from the Royal Collection at Hampton Court, is believed to be one of Caravaggio’s earliest Roman works and has been identified with a painting of the same subject mentioned by his early biographer Giulio Mancini as being painted while he was staying with Pucci. There is, however, no provenance of this painting before 1688 (the year of the Glorious Revolution, but that’s another story) when it was almost a century old and is recorded as being by “Michael Angelo” [Merisi] in the collection of King James II of England and VII of Scotland. As well as this provenance, and despite the painting’s poor condition, the quality of the fruit in the foreground has been seen as enough to justify the attribution to Caravaggio. The small fruit being peeled has been identified as a Neapolitan limoncello, the juice of which was considered beneficial to digestive health, giving the painting moral overtones of temperance and hygiene.
Caravaggio soon fled the temperance, citric acid, and soggy salad of Monsignor Pucci and found lodgings with a certain Tarquinio—an innkeeper and brothel owner—before moving through several artists’ studios (one mentioned belonged to a Sicilian referred only as Lorenzo). He was immersed in the demi monde of the Caput Mundi: those shadowy vicoli populated by people who would become the models for his paintings and provide the extraordinary immediacy of so many gazes undimmed by centuries.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Understanding Rome's Newsletter to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.