Portrait of Maffeo Barberini (c. 1598) is a painting by the ItalianBaroque master Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio. First cataloged in 1963 by Roberto Longhi, one of Italy’s foremost 20th-century art historians, the painting had been in a private collection for decades, largely inaccessible to scholars and had not been featured in any of the major Caravaggio exhibitions.[1] In November, 2024 the painting went on display at the Palazzo Barberini.
Barberini, 30 years old and from the eminent Florentine Barberini family, was a rapidly rising Church prelate, a friend of Caravaggio's patron Cardinal Francesco Maria Del Monte, and himself a poet and patron of the arts. Barberini's support would continue into later years – in 1603 he commissioned a Sacrifice of Isaac from Caravaggio. In 1623 he became Pope as Urban VIII.
