In spite of all the hype, in spite of all the celebrations, and in spite of an exhibition that should have established a milestone, the question of the SpanishEcce Homo given to Caravaggio appears far from settled. If the major exhibition at Palazzo Barberini could (indeed: should) have been the occasion to initiate a profound discussion on this promising discovery, then it can be said that little was achieved, and that the exhibition resembled more a catwalk than an occasion for scientific debate. And little will also be added by the current Capodimonte exhibition, which seems to be more of a coda to the Roman show than a new in-depth study: right, to be sure, to organize a stage of theEcce Homo exhibition in Naples as well, given the painting’s possible Neapolitan genesis, but the Neapolitan exhibition (which simply reproduces the comparison with the Capodimonte Flagellation that we have already seen in Rome) is unlikely to unveil decisive news.
With the Roman exhibition now almost three months over, and when the Neapolitan one is one month away from closing, I believe there are grounds to say that the Italian passage ofEcce Homo was basically a wasted opportunity. And if the objective of the Palazzo Barberini exhibition was to confirm Caravaggio’s authorship, there is every reason to say that it was not achieved, and not only because the group of doubters, though small, has in any case grown, but also because doubts and problems that have emerged in the four years since the discovery ofEcce Homo have been fundamentally evaded in the name of a conviction that the tens of thousands who have stormed the halls of Palazzo Barberini have been asked to accept with almost fideistic deference. So, since scientific solidity should emerge from a comparison that takes into account the greatest possible number of contributions, it might be useful to take stock of what has been said about the painting in recent months.
Let us start, then, with the catalog entry compiled by Maria Cristina Terzaghi, which is supposed to be the most up-to-date writing onEcce Homo. In the text, Terzaghi has, meanwhile, retraced the possible trail that would linkEcce Homo to Spain to reach the conclusion that that “otro quadro de un Heccehomo de zinco palmos con marco de evano con un soldado y Pilatos que la enseña al Pueblo” described in the inventory of the possessions of the Count of Castrillo, viceroy of Naples from 1653 to 1659, and described as “original de m° Miçael Angel Caravacho,” is to be “identified,” the scholar writes, "with our Ecce Homo." A conclusion that, however, Terzaghi believed was already well-founded four years ago, a few months after the discovery: the catalog entry served just to reiterate what the exhibition curator already thought. No news, then, from what was already known, and no news that could shed any light on all the still obscure points: how the viceroy of Naples came into possession of the painting, what relationship it has with theEcce Homo linked to the Massimi commission, and how solid the link between theEcce Homo in the Castrillo inventory and the one discovered actually is, since there are no known definite changes of ownership between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and the backward story of the provenance of the Madrid work at some point, with the data we have, breaks down.
The sheet then focuses on the still controversial dating, a topic introduced, by contrast, by the observation that “the painting’s authorship has been unanimously accepted” (in fact, as will be seen in a moment, this is not the case: there are discordant voices that the exhibition did not take into account at all, and at least one other, not negligible, was added later): according to Terzaghi theEcce Homo would have been painted in the period between Caravaggio’s sojourn in the Latium fiefs of the Colonna family and his first passage to Naples; according to Gianni Papi it would have been painted between Rome and Naples (i.e., between 1604 and 1607, although indicates as the most probable period the two-year period 1605-1606), while for Giuseppe Porzio it would be a late work, executed in the last months of his life (and we limit ourselves to these three scholars just to cover the “currents,” let’s call them that, to date majority). The various positions cover, in essence, a span of at least four years, moreover, four crucial years, those of the last period of Caravaggio’s existence, a period in which his style experiences often rapacious, sudden, radical changes. And the fact that there is all this discord about dating even among scholars who also favor autography can be considered a symptom of the fact that we are dealing with a painting that is still difficult to evaluate. Instead, the rest of the record focuses on iconographic elements, but these seem negligible if the goal is to establish the painting’s autography. It is true that some less gifted copyists overlooked a singular element that Caravaggio takes from Correggio, namely the wreath of the crown of thorns cut so that it looked like a flame, but the same detail is also present in anotherother version of the painting, the one that was reported in the 1950s by Roberto Longhi in a private Sicilian collection, which to this day is untraceable and which we know only from a very poor black-and-white photo, of little use in understanding the quality of the painting.
Again, the card makes no mention of technical details: in 2021, Massimo Pulini, in his study of the work, wrote that on the surface of the painting “it is possible to detect even with the naked eye a series of incisions, of thin grooves that affect the imprimitura of the Madrid canvas and that are recurrent in many works by Merisi.” Perhaps, however, the presence of etchings is no longer to be considered a diriment detail if, as Rossella Vodret herself admits in the catalog of the Palazzo Barberini exhibition, the etchings that the artist traced on thefresh imprimitura, perhaps with the handle of the brush (probably to remind himself of the positions of the models after the posing sessions, or to help set up the composition, and thus to summarily define the setting of the figures, the transitions from light to shadow, the main lines), were not Merisi’s prerogative: “The systematic use of etchings,” we read, “is not a characteristic of Caravaggio alone; many painters even of his time made use of them.” Should we wish to take the engravings into account, however, it must be said that Caravaggio used this medium mainly, though not exclusively, in his last Roman period, a circumstance which, if held good, might suggest a restriction of the chronology to the two-year period 1605-1606 (Claudio Falcucci himself, who carried out the diagnostic investigations on the Madrid painting, claims that the most punctual, if we are talking about engravings, are with the works of the Roman period) and would distanceEcce Homo from the David of the Borghese Gallery to which it has often been juxtaposed (assuming we want to consider the Borghese work to be the result of the first Neapolitan sojourn, or at most of the Colonese period, and not a product of the last months of the artist’s life). In any case, since several artists were in the habit of using engravings, we may not consider them a particularly relevant detail. More useful, if anything, are the sketches of zig-zag white lead that Vodret found on Christ’s chest, shoulder and arm (and which were later confirmed by Falcucci’s diagnostic investigations) giving an account of them in the pages of Finestre sull’Arte and adding that, in this case, it is a mode of operation that still has no counterpart outside Caravaggio. This, at the moment, seems to be the most convincing element, and yet it carries with it in turn a further problem, which will be discussed later.
Many, it was said, are the points that the exhibition has evaded, beginning with the opinions of opposing voices, which, too, it would have been interesting to see discussed. Without considering the scholars who have expressed wait-and-see positions (such as Keith Sciberras, or like Giacomo Berra, who in 2021, in the study that first pointed out the twig of the crown of thorns, said that he would express himself on the possible autography only after cleaning and diagnostic investigations: to date there is no record of him taking a position), and at least citing the curious case of the co-curator of the Rome exhibition, Francesca Cappelletti, who in the catalog of the Rome show did not comment on autography, there are a number of art historians who, in the four years since theEcce Homo was discovered, have advanced perplexities. Beginning with Antonio Vannugli, who said on these pages that he had “strong doubts,” to our knowledge still unresolved: beyond the possible connection with the Massimi commission, on which Vannugli was very precise in stating that we are still moving in the field of pure hypothesis, in his opinion it would be the types of faces that would be the most doubtful element of the painting. Nicola Spinosa, reporting his opinion to Corriere della Sera, had said that in his opinion we are in the presence of a Caravaggio of high quality, perhaps by Ribera, and this by virtue of the moderate tones of this painting, far from the usually dramatic ones of the late Caravaggio. Finally, the most thorough article so far among those ruling out Caravaggesque autography is the one by Camillo Manzitti published in Finestre sull’Arte, and written after the cleaning performed in 2024: the Genoese scholar considered incompatible with Caravaggio’s manner the pathos of the painting, in his opinion poor, the rendering of certain expressions (such as that of the young man behind Caravaggio’s back), and above all the weaknesses in the modeling, considered “impossible to attribute to Caravaggio” (such weaknesses, according to Manzitti, would be found in the insertion of Christ’s right ear, in the defective and unnatural alignment of his eyes, and in the foreshortening of Pilate’s face).
After the Rome exhibition (which, it should be reiterated, on the misgivings put forward by Vannugli, Spinosa, and Manzitti did not take a position) there are no particularly relevant new positions. It almost seems as if there is fear not only in contradicting the attribution, but also in pointing out all the omissions of the exhibition: standing out in this regard were just Pierluigi Panza in Corriere della Sera, who pointed out some of the exhibition’s forgetfulness, starting with the relationship with the Massimi patronage, and Michele Cuppone, author on Aboutartonline of an in-depth review that did not discount the exhibition. In addition to them, the only exception in the context of a critical situation that has remained essentially flattened on preexhibition positions seems to be the opinion of Anna Coliva, opposed to the attribution to Caravaggio, who expressed herself this way in Il Messaggero: "In the ensemble of Caravaggesque works this one [Ecce Homo, nda] is jarring in format and compositional grammar and does not possess, of Caravaggio, the dramaturgical dimension. The work is associated with a single document, Spanish and very late, from 1657, in which, moreover, the figure of a soldier is mentioned, which the young man in the background is not at all. But of course what really matters is the style, and here one cannot fail to notice the compression with which the three figures are inserted into space, the black silhouette of Pilate, outlined and superimposed on the Christ in turn squeezed onto the young man holding the cloak. The profound awareness of spatial distances gives Caravaggio’s figures volume, avoiding precisely, in the paratactic, the flattening that this painting reveals."
So far no mention has been made of the other Ecce Homo historically given to Caravaggio, the one in Palazzo Bianco in Genoa, the real stone guest of the Palazzo Barberini exhibition. In the exhibition and in the catalog not even the slightest mention of the Genoese painting, despite the fact that in the publication the name of Longhi, who first attributed the Palazzo Bianco work to Caravaggio, is mentioned more than two hundred times (also because the Palazzo Barberini exhibition made no secret of the fact that it wanted to place itself in continuity with the first, major exhibition on Caravaggio, the one organized by Longhi himself in 1951 in the halls of the Palazzo Reale in Milan). The catalog’s bibliography did not even include the catalog of the exhibition Caravaggio and the Genoese where even the problem of the autography of theEcce Homo in Palazzo Bianco was addressed in detail. Yet, the Genoa painting continues to be exhibited as an autograph by Caravaggio. The curious fact is that the two technical elements usually adduced to support the Caravaggesque autography of the MadrilenianEcce Homo , the engravings and especially the zig-zag sketches, have also been found in the Genoese painting and, as a result, have often been presented as proof of the Caravaggesque authorship of the work now in Palazzo Bianco.
Now, this coincidence opens up several hypotheses. First: the paintings are both by Caravaggio, and therefore those who used the MadridEcce Homo to disqualify the Genoese one will have to reconsider their positions. Second: we will have to admit that, taking out the engravings that we know were rather widespread, there is to be recognized at least one other artist who employed the zig-zag sketch technique. Third, the two Ecce Homo are both by Caravaggio but perhaps an element needs to be introduced that few if any have taken into account, namely the possibility of finding some spurious element in both paintings. The face of Pilate in the Genoa painting, for example, seems too grotesque and caricatured to be considered a product of Caravaggio’s hand (Sebastian Schütze had already expressed himself on this problem, but he rejected the autographism altogether ). And similarly, one cannot overlook, looking at the MadridEcce Homo , the obvious weaknesses in the modeling of Christ’s face, as well as some of the details depicted in an unrealistic manner, such as Christ’s right collarbone being conspicuously misaligned from the left one (an error hard to think of for an artist who had a good knowledge of anatomy), or the blood stuck to the flesh.
A serious scientific discussion of the autography of Caravaggio’sEcce Homo cannot, therefore, gloss over these important passages. Now, it is not known when the Spanish painting can be seen again in Italy. Here, then, is why the opportunity was wasted: because it would have been useful to take advantage of this Italian passage not to put on an exhibition, moreover with a ban on photography (the SpanishEcce Homo was watched on sight by an attendant who did not move from the chair placed next to the work, and the same anti-photographic security device had been set up for another work that raises more and more doubts, the Dublin Capture : never had I seen employed, in an exhibition, an attendant to exclusively supervise a single painting), but to dispel all the shadows that still hang overEcce Homo. Of course: those who are convinced of the goodness of the autograph could simply say that they disregarded the objections as negligible. In any case, even if they were indeed negligible (and in fact, it turns out, these are not minor issues, these are not observations coming from improvisers), the exhibition, instead of taking a clear position, preferred silence, and this is certainly not the’attitude one expects from an exhibition occasion that should have dissolved doubts and presented the world with a new Caravaggio (also because the result is that the fringe of doubters to date has remained so and, indeed, has grown larger). Certainly, it cannot be said that the autography is unanimously accepted. It would then be desirable to have an exhibition where a word, if not definitive, then at least a solid one could really be said about theEcce Homo in Madrid, an exhibition that would perhaps display the newly discovered work along with the one in the Palazzo Bianco and any copies of it that can be traced (perhaps it would also be a case of going back on the trail of the Sicilian one pointed out by Longhi). But it is not certain that such an exhibition will ever be organized, or at least not in the short to medium term. After all, if at the Palazzo Barberini theEcce Homo has been officially, and pompously, cleared as an autograph, who is now interested in questioning the cards?
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