Spanish museum to showcase newly verified Caravaggio ‘masterpiece’
MADRID (Reuters) – Art lovers will have the chance to contemplate a Caravaggio portrait of Jesus Christ which is to go on display at Madrid’s Prado museum after experts determined it really is the work of the Italian master.
The museum said on Monday it had reached an agreement with the oil-on-canvas painting’s new owner, whose identity it did not disclose.
El Prado said “Ecce Homo” is one of the greatest discoveries in the history of art, as there are only around 60 known works by Caravaggio in existence.
“Ecce Homo” (Behold the Man) was painted between 1605 and 1609 and is believed to have once belonged to the private collection of King Phillip IV of Spain.
It depicts a scene from the Bible’s New Testament in which a mocking Pontius Pilate displays Christ to the crowds. It shows an agonising Christ with blood dripping from his thorn-crowned forehead.
In 2021, Spain blocked the auction of the painting – which was initially attributed to an unknown peer of 17th century Spaniard Jose de Ribera – after experts suggested it might have been the work of Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio.
The previous owners then tasked the London- and New York-based gallery Colnaghi with investigating the painting’s authorship, restoring the painting and potentially selling it.
El Prado said on Monday that the results of the investigation, which reaffirm the initial attribution to the Italian master, will be released to coincide with the painting’s unveiling on May 28 in a special one-piece exhibition.
The work will be on display until October, the museum said in a statement.
It quoted four experts on Caravaggio and Baroque paintings, including art history professor Maria Cristina Terzaghi and art historian Gianni Papi, as describing the painting as a “masterpiece”.
The Italian baroque painter, who died in 1610 in his late thirties after a turbulent life, was a master of using the “chiaroscuro” technique of lighting to make his subjects seem to come alive.
