The first version of "The Taking of Christ", a masterpiece by Michelangelo Merisi, known as Caravaggio, will be exhibited to the public after 70 years. The exhibition can be visited at Palazzo Chigi in Ariccia (Rome), from 14 October 2023 to 7 January 2024. The work, which has been entirely restored, was exhibited only in 1951 at the Palazzo Reale in Milan, curated by Roberto Longhi. The restoration work made it possible to remove the various re-dyes and to confirm the absolute autography of the painter.
The exhibition is sponsored by Ministry of Culture and is organized with the support of Meeting del Mare Foundation (CREA, Culture, Religions, Art) and the cultural association Committee of San Floriano di Illegio. The catalogue, printed by De Luca Art Publishers, is financed with contributions from BCC Foundation of Castelli Romani and Tusculum. The installation is curated by Glocal Project Consulting, which promotes art exhibitions in many countries around the world. The exhibition will arrive later in Naples.
Curated by architect and art historian Francesco Petrucci
The exhibition of the “Taking of Christ” is curated by the architect and art historian Francesco Petrucci, one of the greatest experts on Bernini and Roman Baroque. Due to its exceptional nature, the painting was notified by the Italian State with the Decree of 2 December 2004 of the Minister of Cultural Heritage as a work of particular interest for the national team. Purchased in 2003 from the Roman antiques dealer Mario Bigetti, the painting was considered the best copy of the lost Caravaggio painting from the Mattei Collection, as Roberto Longhi wrote in 1943.
With the restoration, the extraordinary quality of the work clearly emerged, marked by a troubled past made up of plausible changes in ownership and questionable conservative interventions. As a result, the belief began to circulate among scholars that it was Merisi's prototype from which the replica in the National Gallery of Ireland in Dublin, found by Sergio Benedetti in 1993, would derive. In 2004 a very long legal case began to attribute the actual ownership of the work concluded only in 2022, with the recognition of Bigetti's reasons. There are at least two versions of the work: the one exhibited in Ariccia, the one preserved in Dublin and a (dubious) one exhibited in Odessa.
Complex and troubled work
Commenting on the “Taking of Christ”, the architect Petrucci stated: “It is certainly the most complex and also the most troubled work of Caravaggio's private production in the Roman period. It is a work that was paid by Ciriaco Mattei in 1603 to Caravaggio, who had created it in 1602. The work has an illustrious provenance, because it comes from the Ruffo collection in Calabria, before joining the current private collection by the antique dealer and collector Mario Bigetti. It was exhibited only once in 1951 in the great Milan exhibition on Caravaggio but then it was never seen again."
(Photo: Caravaggio Cursed Painter, Facebook Page; Wikipedia; Palazzo Chigi di Ariccia, Facebook Page)
