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Caravaggio in America – Part 3

By Eric M. Zafran - 24. September 2024
Eric Zafran follows the last four of seven Caravaggio acquisitions by American museums in the finale of his provocative series on Caravaggiomania in the U.S.
This is the final installment of an essay on how seven paintings by Caravaggio ended up in American public collections. Retired curator Eric Zafran uncovers the backstory of the museum directors, trustees, curators, dealers, scholars, and conservators who made this happen.
Here are the links to the first and second parts.

Detroit in 1973

It was a long time until the next authentic, but sometimes contested, Caravaggio appeared on the art market and came to America. The Conversion of the Magdalene, now titled simply Martha and Mary Magdalene (fig. 45), was exported from Italy in 1897 and went to Paris, where it was acquired between 1904-06 by Indalecio Gómez, the Argentine Minister to the Imperial Court at Berlin. He took it back home and it passed after his death in 1920 to his cousins, the Gómez-Alzagas, who had it first at their country estancia and then in Buenos Aires by 1965. There it was seen in 1967 by a family member, Martín S. de Alzaga, an art scholar, who initiated research on the painting and brought in David Carritt, now working for Christie’s, London to see it.[135] Carritt believed it to be the lost original of a version at Christ Church, Oxford,[136] and after what he described as eighteen months of complicated negotiations[137] had it sent for auction in London on June 25, 1971.[138] Despite considerable publicity,[139] and supposedly enthusiastic consideration by J. Paul Getty, the work failed to sell at the top bid of 130,000 guineas. The Baroque experts Denis Mahon and Luigi Salerno, however, both expressed a high regard for the painting and when consulted advised that it should now be cleaned.[140] This was done in London, and the work was totally transformed.

Fig. 45 Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, Martha and Mary Magdalene, ca. 1598, oil and tempera on canvas. Detroit Institute of Arts, Gift of the Kresge Foundation and Mrs. Edsel B. Ford, 73.268.

One of the first to see it in September 1972 after this process was Frederick Cummings (fig. 46), then assistant director of the Detroit Institute of Arts and a devoted lover of Italian Baroque art, who in 1965 had organized the great exhibition Art in Italy: 1600-1700 (fig. 47).[141] Although he had previously not been convinced of the painting’s authenticity in its “dirty and damaged” state, he now, as he later related, “was deeply struck by the superb quality and haunting beauty which had been revealed with the removal of decades of accumulated dirt and varnish.”[142] This positive view of the painting was also confirmed by Benedict Nicolson.[143] The sale of the painting was being handled by Hugh (later Sir Hugh) Leggatt (fig. 48) of the London gallery Leggatt Brothers, and one other museum had supposedly already reserved it. They did not take up their option, and so Detroit after “some anxious waiting”[144] received the next option, and the painting was sent there in December 1972 for examination by the museum’s board and potential patrons, as well as the conservation staff and the American Caravaggio scholars Ward Bissell, Richard Spear, and Donald Posner, who all accepted the painting while Alfred Moir believed it to be a copy.[145]

Fig. 46 Fred Cummings, image #FRED_CUMMINGS_BIO-GP3176-1008, Detroit Institute of Arts Research Library & Archives Photography Collection. Image used with permission from Detroit Institute of Arts Research Library & Archives.
Fig. 47 Installation view of Art in Italy, 1600-1700, 1965, Detroit Institute of Arts Research Library & Archives Photography Collection. Image #AR-Exhibitions-1965-ArtinItaly1600-1700-03. Image used with permission from Detroit Institute of Arts Research Library & Archives.
Fig. 48 Sir Hugh Frank John Leggatt, by Lord Snowdon, gelatin silver print, 24 October 1963. Reproduced with the written permission of David Snowdon

The scientific examination of the picture by the museum’s conservator, discovering the artist’s use of egg tempera in addition to the oil paint confirmed for Cummings the authenticity of the painting.[146] Early in January 1973 he thus wrote to Leggatt that “I believe I can give you a clear idea of our position by February 1…I have high hopes for a successful outcome, but it will take me a few more days to pull all the details together. The picture is superb.”[147] Later that month Cummings had a discussion with Señor Martín de Alzaga, who was acting as agent for the actual owner, his relative, Carlos Gómez de Alzaga of Paris. He then wrote to Leggatt to confirm that the Detroit Institute was “seriously interested in purchasing this picture,” but to “finalize certain scholarly and scientific” details, he felt it necessary to go to Rome to study Caravaggio’s contemporary Judith and Holofernes and so asked for an extension of the decision date until they could meet at the end of February in London.[148] The results of this study trip were satisfactory, and so on February 28th Cummings met at Leggatt Brothers’s Gallery with Martín de Alzaga to work out the details. He wrote to him that same day confirming that he was authorized by the museum’s director to offer $1,100,000 for the painting and accepted the condition that it be referred to in the museum’s publications as “The Alzaga Caravaggio.” He added that the Board of Trustees would meet on March 13th to ratify the purchase and then a check would be sent in care of Hugh Leggatt around March 19, 1973.[149]

In September of 1973, Cummings wrote to Denis Mahon to bring him up to date on the Caravaggio, which he found “so stimulating”. He reports that, “after considerable deliberation it was decided to reline the painting,” and after that job was completed, “it proved extremely beneficial…The result is rewarding since the overall paint surface now has what I can describe only as a more ‘healthy’ appearance.” And he adds, “Each of our staff is deeply impressed with the painting, and we all feel increasingly rewarded by it. It is truly a very great picture.”[150]

Unlike most institutions that are secretive about the cost and funding of their acquisitions, Cummings, who had become director in November 1973, and the Detroit Institute of Arts proudly proclaimed in its press release and in newspapers that the cost of their Caravaggio, the museum’s first million dollar purchase, was $1.1 million, of which the Kresge Foundation donated $600,000 and Mrs. Edsel Ford, $500,000.[151] They were all in attendance for the presentation ceremony in late January of 1974. Cummings described the painting as “a key work in the history of art and one that ranks as the most important acquisition of the past forty years.” He further noted that the painting, which finally went on view in the museum on January 14, 1974, “marks the first time that it will be on continuous public display in the past 400 years.”[152] To celebrate the acquisition the museum published a small brochure of “Notes” on the painting by Cummings,[153] and this was followed by more extensive articles and letters in the Burlington Magazine[154] to introduce and confirm the attribution of the painting, called by Newsweek a “million-dollar bargain,”[155] and by Hilton Kramer in the New York Times a “magnificent picture…of considerable historical importance.”[156]

Notes 135-156
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Cleveland’s “Crucifixion of St. Andrew”

Several forces came together to make the Cleveland Museum of Art the next location for the purchase of a Caravaggio. Its director, Sherman Lee (fig. 49), despite being best known as a connoisseur of Asian art, had in 1951, when Deputy Director of the Seattle Art Museum, first conceived an exhibition of Caravaggio and the Tenebrosi, which, however only occurred in 1954 after he had departed.[157] Then in 1971, under his auspices as Director of the Cleveland Museum of Art, he presented the far grander and more significant exhibition Caravaggio and His Followers with Professor Richard Spear of Oberlin College acting as the curator (fig. 50).[158] From American museums, the Hartford, New York, and Kansas City Caravaggios were all assembled and three others came from Europe. So, when the opportunity arose in 1976 for the Cleveland Museum to purchase a Caravaggio for its own great collection, it is understandable that Lee, abetted by his brilliant curator, Ann Tzeutschler Lurie, did not hesitate.

The painting, which had become available was the very large (eight foot high) Crucifixion of St. Andrew (fig. 51) painted by Caravaggio in Naples probably during his first stay there from 1606-1607. Caravaggio’s “theatrical staging” of the Golden Legend account of St. Andrew’s miraculous martyrdom in Patras depicts the saint who was on the cross for three days about to be released by the city’s Proconsul, Aegeus in armor and plumed hat, but the soldiers ordered to do this could not move him. Representing common humanity as a witness to the saint’s divinity is an old woman afflicted with goiter.[159]

Fig. 49 Sherman Lee (retired Director of C.M.A.), negative number 53763, Cleveland Museum of Art Archives.
Fig. 50 Installation view of exhibition titled "Caravaggio and His Followers", October 29, 1971 – January 2, 1972, negative number 41467, Cleveland Museum of Art Archives.
Fig. 51 Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, The Crucifixion of Saint Andrew, ca. 1606-7, oil on canvas, Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, Leonard C. Hanna Jr. Fund, 1976.2.

This altar painting was undoubtedly commissioned by the Spanish Viceroy in Naples, Don Juan Alonso Pimentel y Herrera, Conde de Benavente, who owned several Caravaggios, including, it is believed, the Madonna of the Rosary, which he sold, and is now in Vienna. He was devoted to the adulation of St. Andrew, whose shrine was in nearby Amalfi. The painting of St. Andrew, as Bellori informs us, he took with him back to Spain in 1610 and hung it in his palace in Valladolid where it is recorded as late as 1653.[160] lt then disappeared, apparently passing into an unidentified convent in Castilla, Spain and then a collection identified as A. Tores in Madrid. Next the painting entered the collection of José Manuel Arnaiz also in Madrid and was mentioned in 1973 as being there by the director of the Prado, Xavier de Salas, at a Caravaggio colloquium in Rome.[161] It was also exhibited that year in Seville with a catalogue entry by Alfonso Pérez Sánchez doubting the attribution.[162] The following year, however, Benedict Nicolson made the claim that it, rather than three known copies, was most likely the lost Caravaggio.[163]

It was examined by a number of potential buyers. David Carritt wanted to take it on but lacked sufficient financial backing. Agnews, father and son, went to see it in Madrid, but passed on it, due to the problematic condition.[164] The painting was then legally, if, as Pérez Sánchez later wrote, “scandalously exported” in June 1974, from Spain,[165] to Geneva where it was cleaned and restored by Jan Dik in close consultation with Luigi Salerno and Denis Mahon.[166] Another English dealer, Leggatt Brothers, which had had a hand in the sale of the previously discussed Caravaggio, was willing to attempt the sale on behalf of its owner, Signor Arnaiz, who had joined a syndicate.[167]  According to press reports, it was on the market for some time, but its condition apparently deterred potential purchasers. As Art News reported:

One of the world’s biggest art investment funds decides to buy the painting at a Caravaggio price, but backs out of the deal at the last minute. A number of museums subsequently are invited to examine it and the asking price is said to be $4 million. One museum covets the painting. Another disdains it. A third regards its value as problematic, and a fourth actually buys it.[168]

The magazine suggested that the investors may have been Artemis of London, and the American museums that rejected the painting were Detroit, the Met, and the National Gallery of Art. However, Sherman Lee was willing to take an expensive chance on it, and defensively remarked, “Anyone who says the picture is not right is either stupid, incompetent, or venal.”[169] The painting was reserved for his museum as of November 17, 1975 at a price of $3,500,000 with payments to be made over a period of two to three years.[170] Hugh Leggatt followed up at the end of 1975 with a letter saying an export license had been granted and a 17th-century carved frame was being enlarged for the painting.[171] It was sent on approval to Cleveland the following January, along with photostats of the export documents from Spain showing that it was exported first to Geneva in June 1974.[172] The museum had a period of approximately thirty days to make a decision. It was purchased in February by the unanimous vote of the museum’s Accessions Committee from Leggatt Brothers for a rumored 2.5 million dollars.[173] Lee, who said “within a certain degree of reason, one cannot overpay for a great painting,”[174]  announced the purchase in a press release of April 8, 1976. Here he noted that the St. Andrew “fully embodies the psychological insight and tense, inventive composition characteristic of Caravaggio’s late works…and provides both a historical keystone for the collection and a deeply moving work by a creative genius.” He added, “Like most large paintings of the early Italian baroque, the picture has damages, but is in good condition.”[175]  Already in March Denis Mahon had been to Cleveland to see the painting (which he knew well from its period of restoration in Switzerland) and assisted with the writing of the press release,[176] in which he is quoted as describing the painting, the artist’s only altarpiece in this country, as “the most distinguished 17th-century Italian painting in America.”[177]

“Anyone who says the picture is not right is either stupid, incompetent, or venal.”
– Sherman Lee, on Caravaggio’s ‘St. Andrew’

Nearly forty years after Mahon’s assessment of this great picture, there was a burst of activity surrounding the painting which served to enhance its fame. Central to this was a major restoration (partly conducted in public and recorded in an interactive app) at the Cleveland Museum of Art in 2014-15 by the museum’s Conservator of Paintings, Dean Yoder. [178] The now-restored painting returned to public view in May 2016 as part of the museum’s centennial celebration. Then the following year for six weeks in November – December 2017 it was juxtaposed to the best of the known copies (fig. 52).[179] That same year the museum published a detailed study of the work by Professor Erin E. Benay, who noted that as a result of Sherman Lee’s determination, “The Cleveland Museum of Art’s Crucifixion of Saint Andrew played an important part in the collecting of Caravaggio in America and in the artist’s reception and critical fortunes in this country.”[180] And finally Professor Richard Spear was inspired by this restoration and special exhibition to publish a cover story article on the painting and the question of replicas in The Burlington Magazine. He found that “the Cleveland painting had the richly modulated expressive brushwork of Caravaggio’s late style.”[181]

Notes 157-181
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Fig. 52 Seeing Double at the CMA: Caravaggio’s Crucifixion of Saint Andrew and the “Back-Vega” Copy, 17 November 2017 – 10 December 2017. The Cleveland Museum of Art, Gallery 217. Photography © The Cleveland Museum of Art.

Texas Triumphs

In 1987 a new acquisition was made by the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth. This was Caravaggio’s Cardsharps (fig. 53), shown publicly for the first time that fall at the Metropolitan Museum of Art where it had been restored. The art critic John Russell claimed of this sixth Caravaggio to enter an American public collection, “it is one of the most remarkable Old Master discoveries of recent years,” and he stated that the rumored price was $15 million.[182]

Fig. 53 Caravaggio, The Cardsharps, ca. 1595, Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth. AP 1987.06

The work depicts three figures at a gaming table playing cards—a young man holding his cards is duped by an older bearded man signaling to his partner, a younger cardsharp, who draws the ostensibly winning card from behind his back. The theoretical art historian Michael Fried, in the midst of his complex consideration of the “thematization of absorption in the Cardsharps,” provides a wonderful appreciation of Caravaggio’s achievement here writing:

“The canvas everywhere offers the viewer matter to relish visually, from the daintiness of the young dupe’s hairstyle and clothing, to the torn fingertips of the bravo’s glove, to the richly textured and brightly colored damask doublets of both cardsharps, to the marvelously painted pierced blue oversleeve of the younger cardsharp with drifts of white undersleeve showing through, to the feather in his cap, to the dagger at his belt.”[183]

This visually arresting painting had originally belonged to Cardinal Francesco Maria del Monte and then passed to Cardinal Antonio Barberini and later, in the early 19th century, it was in the Colonna-Sciarra collection in Rome. It was apparently sold by Prince Maffeo Sciarra and exported secretly from Italy to Paris in the 1890s. It has been suggested that the painting may have entered the collection of the noble de Gramont and Rothschild families and was supposedly offered to the National Gallery, London, which declined the purchase.[184] The painting then disappeared, but fortunately it had been recorded at that time in a black and white photograph by Braun. This was one of Caravaggio’s most popular and, as we have seen, most frequently copied paintings, and over the years several other versions had been claimed as the original.[185] It was the good fortune of the late French-American art dealer Jean-Pierre Selz to spot it in the home of a French couple who had no idea what they had.[186] According to Rosella Vodret, the location was Caen, and the work was then sent to Switzerland in 1986.[187] It was a challenge to prove that this was indeed the original,[188] so to do the archival work in Rome documenting the painting’s early history Selz employed H. Lee Bimm, the late American researcher living in Italy. The painting, yet uncleaned, was first offered to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, but its curators were dubious and passed on it. Therefore, it was next offered to the burgeoning and rich Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth, Texas, designed by Louis Kahn (fig. 54). Its enthusiastic director, Theodore (Ted) Pillsbury, was an expert on Italian art and was always trying to bolster his museum’s collection with works by major artists. As he later related, in a public lecture:

Fig. 54 Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth, Texas; constructed 1969–72, South galleries of the Kimbell Art Museum with original furnishings and wooden walls, 1970s, Louis I. Kahn (1901–1974), architect.

When two or three years ago I began to hear rumors of the reappearance of the lost Caravaggio, I reacted with disbelief. How could a great picture of such fame lie hidden for more than ninety years and suddenly turn up?   I assumed and so did my colleagues the so-called ‘discovery’ was at best nothing more than a skillful, perhaps quite firsthand early replica.

My skepticism not withstanding, I reacted all the same to the rumors with a certain curiosity…and I wasted no time in trying to obtain photographs with which to evaluate the work. This initial task required several months of delicate negotiations. When these photographs at last arrived, we received a pleasant surprise and I wasted no time to arrange for an appointment to see the work at a gallery in Switzerland two weeks later.[189]

For this important occasion Pillsbury was accompanied by his deputy director, William Jordan, and John Brealey, the noted English conservator then working at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

As he continues his narrative:

Suffice it to say, I had no reservations about the work the moment I saw it. Despite a thick coat of discolored varnish, the picture literally bowled me over. It was in remarkably good condition…[and] seemed to possess all the hallmarks of the artist’s early manner. Finally I was dazzled by the spatial organization. It seemed almost a virtuoso performance….In April of 1987 only one Caravaggio expert had been permitted to view the work. To expose the painting to a wider circle of opinion, I got permission for the work to be sent to the Kimbell on approval.[190]

Intense technical study of the canvas to establish its authenticity was immediately carried out in Fort Worth by the Kimbell’s conservator, Claire Barry. First it was determined that this painting was indeed identical to the Braun photograph. Then X-radiography confirmed its original dimensions, while examination under infrared revealed some pentimenti in the position of the stripes on the back of the young cheat’s vest. Most significantly Barry discovered that there was an incision in the fingernail of the young cheat in the hand holding the cards. Such incisions had been found to be a characteristic of Caravaggio’s method of working, and this one, although small, seemed to be a deliberate placement mark for the fingers. In addition, there were fine incisions done with a straight edge outlining the backgammon board and delineating the cards in the cheat’s proper right hand and those stacked on the dish on the table. All of this was highly positive evidence, but as Pillsbury determined:

Once the picture was in Texas, we realized it would be cumbersome and inconvenient to fly scholars in to see the work, and New York would be a more convenient and neutral location. We could solicit a wider body of opinion more discreetly and more efficiently. At this juncture one of my worst fears came true – When the picture arrived [at the Metropolitan Museum’s conservation department] in New York, two of the first experts to see it reacted with indifference, bordering upon derision. The reaction shocked and even slightly annoyed me, but I suspected what the problem was and spoke with the owner who consented to have the picture cleaned. This entailed removing the thick coating of varnish and dirt, which obscured the full beauty of the forms and colors. This cleaning proceeded quickly and immediately revealed the extraordinary state and quality of the original.[191]

It was John Brealey who supervised this process,[192] but the actual cleaning was carried out by Gilles Panhard, and for the facing, lining removal, and relining he was assisted by Dorothy Mahon and Jim Coddington. During the course of scraping off the glue from the old lining, Panhard uncovered the remnants of an old wax seal on the verso of the original canvas. Yet another of John Brealey’s assistants, Gisela Helmkampf, recalled that a colleague of hers at the Capitoline Museum had previously sent her a tracing of the wax seal found during conservation on the verso of that museum’s Caravaggio The Fortune Teller. This she still had in an envelop on her work cart and when compared to the one on the Cardsharps, they were found to be the identical seals of the paintings’ first owner, Cardinal Francesco Maria del Monte.[193] This laboratory discovery thus proved to be one of the most convincing arguments in favor of the painting’s authenticity.[194]

After this as Pillsbury related:

There remained one delicate question! What was such a picture worth? My colleagues and I were old-fashioned enough to believe that there is something rather embarrassing, if not obscene, about pictures costing 8 figure sums (over $10,000,000). We bargained long and hard, first to get the asking price down by more than one quarter and then to devise terms so that we could afford the purchase out of income.  This process actually began the day after I saw the picture in Switzerland and proceeded into July when the board finally approved the acquisition.[195]

As mentioned previously, the painting was first displayed at the Metropolitan Museum where it had been restored and then it went to its new home in Texas, where it was put on public view the very same day as Ted Pillsbury’s insightful lecture (fig. 55), December 11, 1987.

Fig. 55 Ted Pillsbury with The Cardsharps, Kimbell Art Museum Archives.

Once again it was Sir Denis Mahon (knighted in 1986) who was invited to first publish a scholarly article on the painting in the January 1988 issue of The Burlington Magazine. He reported on his astonishment at seeing it first in the conservation department of the Metropolitan Museum in May of 1987, recognizing it as identical to the Braun photograph, and being convinced by the presence of the collector’s stamp, and the notable pentimenti. Mahon concluded that it was a very early work by Caravaggio and perhaps the very work which first attracted the attention of his patron, Cardinal del Monte.[196] Following Mahon’s article in The Burlington Magazine was an “Appendix” on the painting by the Met’s own distinguished Caravaggio expert, associate curator of European Paintings, Keith Christiansen, which in even greater detail reviewed the physical condition of the painting, and ended by stating that as the artist’s early biographer, Bellori, had suggested, “this picture marked the turning point in Caravaggio’s fortunes.”[197]

notes 182-197
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The Met’s Second Caravaggio

The last Caravaggio (as of this writing) to enter the collection of an American museum was a late work by the artist, The Denial of St. Peter (fig. 56), which came to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, as a combination gift and purchase in 1997 from the longtime New York dealer Herman Shickman.  This painting depicts in concise form the Biblical account of St. Peter’s traitorous act of denying three times to a soldier and a woman his devotion to Jesus. Caravaggio sets the scene at night with a fire in the background providing illumination. According to Creighton Gilbert it is actually the moment after the denials, when “the maid to whom the saint had spoken is passing the news to the soldier who here stands in for the usual group. We are between the moments of denial and Peter’s tearful repentance.”[198]

Fig. 56 Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, The Denial of Saint Peter, ca. 1610, oil on canvas, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Gift of Herman and Lila Shickman, and Purchase, Lila Acheson Wallace Gift, 1997.167.

The Met’s online provenance listing provides the history of the painting which is recorded in Rome in 1613 as having been given to the painter Guido Reni.[199] It then passed to the Savelli family of Rome and Naples. After entering the Neapolitan art market following World War II, it was purchased in 1952 by the principe Vincenzo Imparato Caracciolo, a member of a long-established Neapolitan aristocratic family, and it was then inherited by his daughter, Elena Imparato Caracciolo of Naples and Milan. Since the famed art expert Roberto Longhi initially rejected it as a Caravaggio, in 1966 it was exported by her as a Manfredi to a bank in Lausanne, Switzerland.[200] There, it was acquired in 1970 by the restorer Jan Dik and the longtime American dealer Julius Weitzner, now resident in London. But when Longhi reversed his opinion, Weitzner had to negotiate with the Italian government, and the wily dealer, in order to obtain what he called “a sort of pardon”, had to exchange another work of art for the newly identified Caravaggio. He presented them with what he described as “a great Francesco Guardi 12 x 14 feet—already in Rome—and worth at least $500,000.” This “absolution,” as Weitzner called it, formally cleared the work for resale,[201] although for some Italian museum officials it still remains an “illegal export.”[202]

Weitzner had the painting taken to London where, as he wrote to his good friend, the collector Dr. Bob Jones, Jr, “it has been cleaned under the personal scrutiny of Denis Mahon. It is in fantastic state and a great work of art…and the price is $2,000,000.”[203] In a follow up letter the dealer confided to the collector, “I have not offered it yet for sale—frankly I don’t know how to begin. All the great experts tell me it is beyond price—and I should ask a big price—I am scared of these big sums—over a million pounds!” [204] Dr. Bob (as he was known), who as a token of his friendship with Weitzner had in his collection a flattering portrait of the dealer by the fashionable New York painter John Koch (fig. 57),[205] presciently replied that he did not think the sale of the painting would be “too big a problem—I think either the Metropolitan or Cleveland would give their eye teeth for it, and I am sure Norton Simon or Getty would go for it also.”[206] It did, however, take some time to find a buyer willing to meet the high price.

Fig. 57 John Koch, Portrait of Julius Weitzner, oil on canvas, 20th century, Museum & Gallery at Bob Jones University.

It was only in 1976 (ten years before Weitzner’s death at age 90) that Herman Shickman and his assistant, Norman Leitman, first saw the painting in London and came to an agreement on its purchase. Following this, they had it sent to Switzerland for storage in the vaults under the Zurich airport.[207] Once Shickman had the issue of its export finally resolved, the painting was shown publicly for the first time in the 1982 exhibition of Neapolitan art held in London and Washington, D. C. (fig. 58) [208] Then he lent it to the Metropolitan Museum’s 1985 Age of Caravaggio exhibition, organized  by the museum’s curator, Keith Christiansen, who according to the New York Times had “had his eye on the painting for many years,”[209] and would publish it as “indubitably by Caravaggio.”[210] Shickman lent it  as “private collection.”[211] and in 1997, when Christiansen told Shickman “this is a picture I’d love to see in the Met one day…he responded that he’d like to see it here too.” Later in the dealer’s office, “he proposed that he make a gift of half the value of the picture.” To allay the diligent curator’s fears about the export issue, Shickman informed him, “That was already dealt with. I have the verdict of the case and he furnished the document for me.”[212] So, later that year after Christiansen had obtained “outside opinions on the value of the picture”[213], its acquisitions was approved at a price rumored to be ten million dollars, half the value would be purchased and half donated, at first anonymously, and then a few years later under the dealer’s name.[214]

Fig. 58 Installation view of the exhibition Painting in Naples from Caravaggio to Giordano, 1983, Courtesy of the National Gallery of Art Archives, Washington, D.C.

The Denial of St. Peter, painted in what Christiansen in his most recent Caravaggio study identifies as the “spectral style of…the very last months of Caravaggio’s life,” [215] was prominently exhibited in the National Gallery of London’s 2005 exhibition Caravaggio: The Final Years. There it was described by Christiansen as a work in which “Caravaggio probes with unparalleled poignancy a dark world burdened by guilt and doom, suggesting to some scholars an intersection with his biography.”[216] In 2017, the Met was able to examine in greater detail this late manner of Caravaggio by placing its Denial of St. Peter alongside another darkly powerful work from the same period, The Martyrdom of St. Ursula, lent by a Neapolitan bank (fig. 59). As the museum’s press release announced this mini-exhibition titled Caravaggio’s Last Two Paintings “will offer a rare opportunity to see these pictures side by side and to examine the novelty of Caravaggio’s late style, in which the emphasis is less on the naturalistic depiction of the figures and more on their psychological presence.”[217] There was no catalogue for this exceptional event, but curator Christiansen did write several online articles for the Now at the Met series. In the first he commented on the importance of the hand gestures in the Met’s painting, notably the saint’s hands beating upon his breast to express “contrition, repentance, shame and reprehension.”[218] This powerful emotion was also he wrote, further emphasized by the “spotlight illuminating Peter’s face, enhancing the conflicted expression of angered denial and remorse.”[219] Likewise in the St. Ursula that depicts the saint’s “murder …in a fashion that astonished those who saw it, Caravaggio staged it in his perpetual night.”[220]

Fig. 59 Caravaggio, Martyrdom of St Ursula, 1610, Banca Intesa Sanpaolo, Le Gallerie d’Italia, Palazzo Zevallos Stigliano, Naples © Alamy / Heritage Image Partnership Ltd

Thus, the Metropolitan Museum of Art achieved the enviable position of having two of the rare authentic works by Caravaggio in America, spanning his first and last periods (fig. 46). It brought the total number of the artist’s paintings in this country to seven, until such time as another lost masterpiece surfaces and can be acquired. In the meantime there has been in recent years a continual shuffling of the seven American paintings, sometimes combined with works from Europe, in both general and focus exhibitions on the Baroque period and Caravaggio (fig. 60).[221]

notes 198-221
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Dispelling the “Gloom” of Caravaggio

It is certainly fair to say that with the arrival of these authentic works by Caravaggio in America and the many publications and exhibitions they have helped inspire that the early gloom of Caravaggio’s reputation has forever been dispelled. When Professor Walter Friedlaender published his breakthrough Caravaggio Studies in 1955, he began his “Foreword” by writing, “In the past few years Caravaggio’s popularity with the public at large has increased astonishingly.”[222] And by the time of the updated Schocken edition of the book in 1969, the astonishment had grown as by then three authentic Caravaggios were now in America and included in Friedlaender’s catalogue raisonné.[223] So today the fact that seven of the artists approximately sixty-five paintings are now in American museums is even more astonishing. As we have seen, this process of acquisition was not easy and the result it provides, although it does not negate visits to Italy, or across Europe from Dublin and London to Potsdam and St. Petersburg, to see the remainder of the master’s oeuvre, is to give us the personal exposure to the artist that Friedlaender deemed so important—“a patient searching and understanding of every individual work… and the comprehension of the significance each work had for the community and for human feelings generally.”[224] We are fortunate that these seven works span the artist’s career from what Friedlaender called “the frivolous boys”[225] of his early genre paintings in Rome through to his later Neapolitan works with what another great art historian, Professor Sydney J. Freedberg, has described as the painter’s “ever deepening sense of the inwardness of feeling… in a new kind of religious art which makes its persons actual and its subject matter utterly contemporary.”[226]

notes 222-226
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Fig. 60 Installation view of the exhibition Burst of Light: Caravaggio and his Legacy, Wadsworth Atheneum Musuem of Art, Hartford, 2013. Allen Phillips/Wadsworth Atheneum
Acknowledgements
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Eric M. Zafran was most recently curator of European Art at the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art in Hartford, Connecticut from 1997-2012. He curated exhibitions ranging from Gauguin, Ballet Russes, to Masters of French Paintings – coincidentally, his first and last shows there were on Caravaggio. For over forty years he has also held curatorial positions at the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, MFA Boston, the High Museum in Atlanta, and the Chrysler Museum, Norfolk.
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