Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic It is Easter week, Jubilee year, and all-out Caravaggio season in Rome. More than half of the artist’s total surviving works are currently and exceptionally in the city that formed and loved him. In Palazzo Barberini’s magnificent monograph exhibition Caravaggio 2025, two dozen paintings tell the deeply moving story of his brief, revolutionary, fast-changing oeuvre; they include rare loans, unprecedentedly uniting groups of pictures dispersed across continents, and works entirely new to Caravaggio shows. A further 15 paintings allow a Caravaggio trail, which visitors can devise as they wish, stretching from early marvels at the Galleria Borghese and Doria Pamphilj — the luscious tease “Boy with a Basket of Fruit”, the enchanting, refined “Rest on the Flight into Egypt”, where Joseph holds up a score for the violinist-angel serenading the Holy Family — to works in churches and basilicas and, most monumental of all, the Vatican’s “Entombment of Christ”, the heavy dead body seemingly being lowered into our space by bowed, bent mourners visibly struggling with its weight. Opened exceptionally during the exhibition is the Casino Boncompagni Ludovisi, showing Caravaggio’s only ceiling painting, “Jupiter, Neptune and Pluto”.Even Caravaggio devotees will make discoveries at the Barberini, beginning with charismatic, suave “Maffeo Barberini” (1598) in copper-green cassock, dash of reflective white lead on his eyes giving his gaze a dazzling intensity as he extends his arm towards us with a sudden impatient gesture, conversing across the centuries. The individualism and ambition of two young arrivals striking out in Rome — Caravaggio, born in Milan, was then 27; the Florentine Barberini, later Pope Urban VIII, just 30 — shines from this boldly intimate portrait, never shown publicly until Palazzo Barberini displayed it last autumn to herald this exhibition.Another newcomer, the controversial “Ecce Homo” — Pilate leaning discomfortingly across a balcony into our space, trying to read the crowd; an open-mouthed torturer in the shadows — appeared unattributed in a 2021 Madrid auction catalogue, estimate €1,500. Rapidly accepted as an autograph work, it reportedly sold for €36mn and was loaned in 2024 to the Prado; this is its inaugural display in a Caravaggio show, to be judged alongside known masterpieces.Mostly chronologically arranged, the Barberini exhibition opens with the blaze of Caravaggio’s early challenge to the Roman Renaissance: the cacophonous altarpiece “The Conversion of Saul” (1600-01), commissioned then rejected by lawyer Tiberio Cerasi. The extreme physical rendering of Jesus, plunging forcefully into natural reality, towards Saul in a chaos of tangled limbs, discarded clothes, helmets, horse’s swishing tail and rearing head, was unthinkably daring in 1600: Caravaggio had brought the divine into our earthly world.In the Cerasi chapel at Santa Maria del Popolo is “Conversion on the Way to Damascus”, the reject’s stupendous successor, which was accepted: Saul, flat on the ground, foreshortened from the head, arms outstretched in astonishment, dwarfed by the haunch of his enormous skewbald horse. In 1958, poet Thom Gunn wrote about waiting for the light in this dim chapel, watching “the large gesture of solitary man/Resisting, by embracing, nothingness”. One reason for Caravaggio’s contemporary appeal is that doubters as well as believers relate to his religious paintings.With such works, Caravaggio smashed high Renaissance distinctions between idealised artifice and everyday life. Classical inspiration remained — at the Barberini, the figure of the sulkily withdrawn adolescent “Saint John the Baptist” (1604-06) quotes the antique statue the “Dying Gaul”, although the rough sunburned hands and neck are those of a labourer — but Caravaggio also took models from Rome’s streets. All his characters convince as flesh and blood beings, in an art of mystic realism that gave biblical texts visual immediacy and infused every canvas, secular and sacred, with eternal dramas of fate, innocence and violence, hope and despair. It’s there already in the feverish worldly paintings made for Caravaggio’s first patron Cardinal Francesco Maria del Monte in 1596-97, hung at the Barberini entrance with “Saul”. Each stars Caravaggio’s favourite companion, the blushing boy with pouting painted lips nicknamed Cecco de Caravaggio, and undercuts pleasure with distrust. The lovely naïf is cheated in “The Fortune Teller” — the gypsy surreptitiously removes his ring — and in the game of chance and deceit “The Cardsharps”. In the Metropolitan Museum’s voluptuous “The Musicians”, where Cupid is probably posed by Cecco, a lutist strums to a madrigal setting of Jacopo Sannazaro’s sonnet about youthful hubris — “Icarus fell here, these waves do know it”.Opposite, Cecco reappears, hardly changed, as the angel in the glistening nocturne “Saint Francis of Assisi in Ecstasy”, Caravaggio’s first religious painting, also commissioned by del Monte, who is depicted as his saint namesake, swooning dreamily into the boy’s arms — as sensually yearning as “The Musicians”.A joy at the Barberini is the strong early work, redressing recent exhibitions’ emphasis on late Caravaggio. A star gathering are the paintings 1598-1600, from Madrid, Detroit and Rome, modelled by Sienese courtesan Fillide Melandroni. Her assertive character, delicate yet determined features, wide eyes and high cheekbones, and exquisite fashions, lend sacred narrative the personal charge and glamour of portraits.Majestic in lapis lazuli blue and gold in “Saint Catherine of Alexandria”, she strokes the sword of martyrdom like a tender lover. In “Martha and Mary Magdalene”, her plainly dressed, earnest sister radiates a divine light, falling on the Magdalene in rich purple and crimson; Melandroni’s expression compellingly blends pride, resistance, regret, dawning faith.Then, almost stunned at her own power, Melandroni is a resolute “Judith Beheading Holofernes”, her beauty contrasted with her grizzled old servant and the Assyrian general, screaming at the moment between life and death.In this pivotal painting, Caravaggio’s youthful luminosity develops into the mature chiaroscuro theatricality with which he spotlit, from a haunted darkness, acute instants of moral choice or recognition, physical agony or terror.They unfold from 1603-10, growing more sombre, more compacted, after 1606, when he was on the run for murder: Judas kiss, John’s flight, Jesus’s quiescence, Caravaggio himself an eager onlooker, in “The Taking of Christ”; Milan’s pared-down “Supper at Emmaus” with its meagre still life, intent apostles and uncomprehending inquisitive innkeeper; the decapitated head, another self-portrait, still howling, in “David with the Head of Goliath”; finally the arrow piercing the breast so quickly that victim and aggressor look almost bemused in “The Martyrdom of Saint Ursula”.Beyond the show, wandering from church to church, you hardly need a map — crowds swarming at the entrances signal the great Caravaggio altarpieces still in their original sites. At San Luigi dei Francesi is the Saint Matthew cycle, beginning with the tax collector singled out to be an apostle as he sits in a busy inn; Pope Francis remembers visiting these paintings frequently as a young cleric. At the Basilica di Sant’Agostino, two euros in a coin slot illuminate the “Pilgrim’s Madonna”, infant and mother huddled in a doorway, worshipped by a couple of ragged passers-by with filthy clothes and bare feet, inevitably recalling the homeless encountered on Rome’s streets today. The city is shrine to many great, timeless artists, but none catch the breath of life around us as Caravaggio does.To July 6, caravaggio2025.barberinicorsini.orgFind out about our latest stories first — follow FT Weekend on Instagram and X, and sign up to receive the FT Weekend newsletter every Saturday morning
rewrite this title in Arabic A blockbuster show of Caravaggio in Rome
مال واعمال
مواضيع رائجة
النشرة البريدية
اشترك للحصول على اخر الأخبار لحظة بلحظة الى بريدك الإلكتروني.
© 2025 جلوب تايم لاين. جميع الحقوق محفوظة.