Caravaggio paintings from around the world have come home to Rome.
The 24 works in the Caravaggio 2025 exhibit at Rome’s National Gallery of Ancient Art at Palazzo Barberini include nine from foreign lenders, five from American museums.
New York Times reporter Elisabetta Povoledo in a feature on the blockbuster exhibition noted that it brings back to the palazzo for the first time in centuries Caravaggio’s “The Cardsharps,” owned by the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth, “Concert” from the Metropolitan Museum in New York City and “St. Catherine of Alexandria” from the Thyssen-Bornemisza National Museum in Madrid.
More than 60,000 tickets have been sold to the exhibition, which runs through June 6, she reported.
The show also features two works recently attributed to Caravaggio, “Ecce Homo” and a portrait of Maffeo Barberini, later Pope Urban VIII.
Exiled from Rome after committing a murder, Caravaggio died in 1610 at age 38, possibly killed. After leaving Rome, he traveled between Naples, Sicily and Malta, hoping for a papal pardon.
The artist whose mastery of light and shadow made him a major influence on Baroque artists, fascinates art lovers with his violent personality contrasting with his aesthetic sensibility.
Some 430 years after the Lombardi artist arrived in Rome for a successful career destroyed by violence, many of his most striking paintings are reunited in the ancient city.
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