Portrait of Maffeo Barberini

Caravaggio painted the portrait of Maffeo Barberini, the future Pope Urban VIII, around 1598 during his early years in Rome. The young cleric appears in elegant ecclesiastical dress, his intelligent, ambitious face emerging from deep shadow in Caravaggio's characteristic dramatic lighting. The portrait captures a man of culture and ambition who would become one of the greatest papal art patrons.

Barberini later commissioned major works from Bernini and Pietro da Cortona, transforming Rome with Baroque architecture and art during his papacy (1623-1644). He built much of St. Peter's Square and his family palace, now home to Italy's national gallery. This early portrait by Caravaggio shows him before his rise to supreme ecclesiastical power. The painting remains in a private collection, one of Caravaggio's rarer secular portraits outside the dramatic religious works for which he is most famous.