BEFORE the Papal Jubilee of 1600, two Lombard painters travelled in the early 1590s from their native Milan southwards, possibly by way of Venice, as both Mannerist artists seem to have been aware of the Venetian tradition of colour in design. The older artist, Francesco Nappi (1565-1638), is rather less well known than Michelangelo Merisi (1571-1610), called Caravaggio after his home village, who is celebrated with 22 autograph works in the current exhibition in Rome (with a further two attributed).
Once in Rome, both came into the ambit of Giuseppe Cesari, the Cavaliere d’Arpino (1568-1640), no mean artist himself, who amassed his own collection, which excited enough jealousy for the pope to seize it in 1607 on trumped-up charges. Caravaggio lodged with Cesari and was briefly his pupil, painting the flower and fruit studies for which he had made his reputation in the North.
In 1600, Nappi, with several other artists, under the direction of Cesari, painted in the Blessed Sacrament chapel of San Nicola in Carcere, but concentrated mainly on fresco painting; he decorated the exterior of the Palazzo Madama (now the Senate), for instance, where Merisi had stayed, and where it is likely that the latter’s paintings of The Cardsharps and The Gypsy Fortune-Teller first hung together.
In 1603, Nappi was commissioned by Bishop Andrés Fernández de Córdoba to fresco the cloister at Santa Maria sopra Minerva. In the French Church of San Luigi near by, Caravaggio’s cycle of three paintings of the life of St Matthew in the Contarelli chapel (1599-1600) excited, and continues to so do, widespread interest and amazement, while, in 1604, he painted the Madonna dei Pellegrini for a memorial chapel in Sant’Agostino. By then, both Nappi and Merisi were members of the Rome Accademia di San Luca.
The Dominican cloister is well worth visiting; in comparison with Caravaggio’s works, one steps back into the 16th century. This could be Sodoma painting a century earlier for the Abbey of Monte Oliveto Maggiore, south-east of Siena. Round the corner, Merisi was effecting a revolution in art. This is not to deny Nappi’s skill, but to accentuate his contemporary’s extraordinary achievement in the same environment.
Thomas Clement Salomon, one of the three curators of this exhibition, recently showed the portrait of Mgr Maffeo Barberini (1568-1644), the future pope Urban VIII (1623), from a private collection by way of heralding this exhibition. Known to scholars and widely reproduced since 1963, this brought to life one of Merisi’s early patrons. The National Gallery expects to acquire it.
Just turned 30, the young protonotary apostolic makes a commanding gesture with his right hand, while Caravaggio delineates his graceful power that he would bring to the throne of St Peter. Beside it is the other portrait from three years earlier (private collection, Florence) attributed to Merisi. It is far from convincing, despite the glass vase of flowers on the table. Although it is somewhat flat, it does catch the nervousness of the young, promoted thanks only to family connections.
Archivio Patrimonio Artistico Intesa Sanpaolo/foto Luciano Pedicini, NapoliCaravaggio (Michelangelo Merisi), Martyrdom of Saint Ursula (1610), oil on canvas, 143 × 180 cm, on loan from the collection of the Intesa Sanpaolo Gallerie d’Italia, Naples
Thereafter, Maffeo never commissioned Caravaggio again. It was left to the astute purchases by a later member of the family, Cardinal Antonio Barberini, from the estate of Cardinal Francesco Maria del Monte, when it went under the hammer to pay off creditors, to bring in no fewer than seven paintings by Merisi.
The hang in four rooms is chronological and charts the meteoric career of a short-lived artist who was dead within 15 years of first entering Rome on the Via Flaminia. The exhibition includes two church altarpieces, the colourful first version (1600-01) of The Conversion of Saul, intended for a chapel in Santa Maria del Popolo, next to the Porta Flaminia (Odescalchi Collection, Rome), and the magnificent Flagellation commissioned in 1607 for the Dominicans in Naples.
The Saul dominates the first room of early works, where the Boy Peeling Fruit (Hampton Court Palace) and the Sick Bacchus, in the Borghese family collection from 1607 as one of the Cavaliere d’Arpino’s confiscated treasures, are brought back together. In both, the detailed still-lifes of fruit suggest Christian symbolism.
The Flagellation hangs between the recently discovered Ecce Homo, which turned up in a Spanish auction house in 2021, estimated at €1500, and the David with the Head of Goliath, from the Galeria Borghese. Violence is never far behind and is often to the fore in Caravaggio’s compositions. Even the Supper at Emmaus (The Brera, Milan) has a darkening sense of foreboding.
It is a sad reflection that so many works once in the Palazzo Barberini were sold off, both in the 18th century, as a result of family feuds, and after 1934, when a royal decree permitted the sale of the collection abroad, which could have been legally challenged. The state kept only a few pictures.
The Lute Player (New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art), the 1594 Saint Francis in Ecstasy (Hartford, CT, Wadsworth Athenaeum), the Fort Worth Card Players, and Saint Catherine of Alexandria (Madrid, Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza) were all lost then. Seeing these works in the palace where they had been housed for some three centuries is both a coup for the exhibition organisers and a treat for the visitors. It is also a cheerless reminder of the risks occasioned by hasty de-accessioning.
Another of the co-curators, Maria Cristina Terzaghi (alongside Francesca Cappelletti), has long researched the collection amassed by the Ligurian city banker and Genoese nobleman Ottavio Costa, who was resident in Rome. It included both the Hartford version of the Saint Francis in Ecstasy (Arts, 12 May 2023; the autograph replica is in Udine) and a painting of the Conversion of the Magdalen (Detroit), the choice from which Costa left in his 1606 will to the Abbot Ruggero Tritonio. Costa also had commissioned the Judith and Holofernes that was acquired for the permanent collection here only in 1971. Christ Church, Oxford, holds a version of the Detroit piece, and an identical version of the story of Judith’s revenge has been recently found in Toulouse.
To see the three brought together offers a chance to reflect on religious sensibility at the end of the 16th century. Each of the works is sensuous and would never have served as altarpieces in post-Tridentine Italy. Merisi, knowing his audience, invites our longing gaze, whether for the unblemished beauty of the Israelite heroine as she commits homicide, for the vulnerable young saint reeling backwards under the intent care of an angel, or for the Magdalen’s glowing skin.
The face of the Magdalen shows some of the qualities that Merisi brought to portraiture. Like the St Catherine and Judith, the model might have been his Sienese girlfriend, the courtesan Fillide Melandroni. Although the exhibition makes the claim that he revolutionised this genre, too, it is hard to see how in this display. Private collections may still house others, known from early engravings, but even those reasonably accessible — that of Scipione Borghese in Montepulciano (Fondazione Musei Senesi, Siena), for instance — are not wholly convincing.
Although he does not always accurately portray bodily forms, there is something in the rhythm of the bodies and even their contortions which goes well beyond what Nappi ever attempted. Look for a moment at the right-angled left forearm of the Baptist in the Wilderness, burnished in light in sharp contrast to the shadows that make it impossible for us to see what he is thinking. Anatomically, it makes a nonsense of his foreshortened left shoulder, but, taken with his exposed right thigh, it establishes a verticality in the composition that would otherwise be routine.
Or look at St Catherine. She seems almost to play the sword of martyrdom as if plucking a string while the fingers of her left hand find notes in the neck of the instrument. It is running with proleptic blood. The sheer luxury of her dress swirling around her conceals her lower body while conveying a sense of her monumentality as a heroine of the Faith. In stark contrast comes the last portrait, a grim-faced Knight of Malta, which seemingly won Merisi his commissions and a knighthood in that order as another bruiser and “bad boy”. Nappi had a rather less adventurous life and died in Rome about 1638.
“Caravaggio 2025” runs at the Gallerie Nazionali, Palazzo Barberini, Via delle Quattro Fontane 13, Rome, until 6 July. The entrance to the cloister of the ex-monastery of Santa Maria sopra Minerva is at Piazza della Minerva 42. The Palazzo Barberini is closed on Mondays.
