“Caravaggio can freeze a moment — it’s hypnotic, magnetic and it’s coming home,” said Paola Nicita, an art historian who worked on the loan.
Roberto Longhi, the art critic who first announced the discovery of the work in 1963, learned that the family had bought it from a curator of the Barberini family’s vast art collection, which was broken up in the 1930s.
Maffeo Barberini knew Caravaggio in Rome as a young man in the 1590s and is known to have sat for him and purchased art from him.
“Maffeo was a poet, and an ambitious intellectual who discovered the sculptor Bernini,” said Nicita.
“I believe it was painted in 1598 because Barberini’s hand gesture is similar to Christ’s in Caravaggio’s Calling of St Matthew, also painted that year,” she added.
