Ciriaco Mattei, a wealthy Roman nobleman and a friend of the painter, commissioned several masterpieces from Caravaggio, including, simultaneously in 1603, Supper at Emmaus, which now belongs to the National Gallery in London, and The Taking of Christ, which is the pride of the National Gallery of Ireland.
Francesca Cappelletti, now director of the Galleria Borghese in Rome, found the original contract for the commission as a graduate student in the late 1980s. The painting had been misattributed to the Dutch painter Gerard van Honthorst from 1793 until then. Known in Italy as Gherardo delle Notti, van Honthorst was one of many painters who flocked to Rome to imitate Caravaggio’s distinctive chiaroscuro style.
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The painting, which is on loan to the Caravaggio 2025 exhibition at the Palazzo Barberini in Rome, stayed in the Mattei family until 1802, when it was sold to the Scottish collector William Hamilton Nisbet. A descendant of Nisbet tried to bequeath it to the National Gallery of Scotland in 1920, but the Edinburgh museum declined, believing the Caravaggio and other pictures given with it to be copies.
Marie Lea-Wilson, an Irishwoman, purchased the painting in Edinburgh in 1921 and took it home to Dublin, where she was a much-loved paediatrician. In 1930 Lea-Wilson gave it to the Jesuit House at 35 Leeson Street, to thank priests who comforted her when her husband, Capt Percival Lea-Wilson of the Royal Irish Constabulary, was assassinated by the IRA. The painting hung in the Jesuits’ diningroom, gathering soot and dust, for 63 years.
The Jesuits asked Sergio Benedetti, head curator at the National Gallery of Ireland, to assess their paintings for restoration. Benedetti recognised the lost Caravaggio. The Jesuits put the masterpiece on permanent loan to the NGI.
“My mother and I travelled from Belfast to see The Taking of Christ when it was unveiled in 1993,” Caroline Campbell, the director of the NGI, says. “I felt exalted and astonished ... This painting is really, really, really loved, and that is extraordinary.”
The painting is like a close-up of the crucial moment when Judas betrayed Christ to Roman soldiers by identifying him with a kiss. At the centre of the canvas stand Judas and a Roman soldier, both holding on to Christ. The Saviour looks down at his folded hands with an expression of suffering and resignation. His face is powerfully moving, even to nonbelievers. No reproduction can do it justice. “This Christ is one of the most beautiful in the history of art,” Thomas Clement Salomon, director of Italy’s National Gallery, says.
To the left of the canvas John the Evangelist attempts to flee, but a second Roman soldier has grabbed his cloak. To the right is a self-portrait of Caravaggio, illuminating the scene with a lantern.
At the Rome exhibition, Campbell is struck by similarities between The Taking of Christ and The Martyrdom of St Ursula, painted eight years later, shortly before Caravaggio’s death. Again, we see two Romans in burnished armour, and the painter himself, as an onlooker. “Caravaggio must have been thinking about The Taking of Christ just before he died,” Campbell concludes.
Caravaggio 2025 is at Palazzo Barberini, in Rome, until July 6th
